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WASTEWATER BLENDING

(109–10)

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON

WATER RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON

TRANSPORTATION AND

INFRASTRUCTURE

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

APRIL 13, 2005

Printed for the use of the

Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure

(
COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE

DON YOUNG, Alaska, Chairman

THOMAS E. PETRI, Wisconsin, Vice-Chair

SHERWOOD L. BOEHLERT, New York

HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

WAYNE T. GILCHREST, Maryland

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

PETER HOEKSTRA, Michigan

VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan

SPENCER BACHUS, Alabama

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

SUE W. KELLY, New York

RICHARD H. BAKER, Louisiana

ROBERT W. NEY, Ohio

FRANK A. LOBIONDO, New Jersey

JERRY MORAN, Kansas

GARY G. MILLER, California

ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina

ROB SIMMONS, Connecticut

HENRY E. BROWN, JR., South Carolina

TIMOTHY V. JOHNSON, Illinois

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

SAM GRAVES, Missouri

MARK R. KENNEDY, Minnesota

BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania

JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas

JIM GERLACH, Pennsylvania

MARIO DIAZ-BALART, Florida

JON C. PORTER, Nevada

TOM OSBORNE, Nebraska

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas

MICHAEL E. SODREL, Indiana

CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania

TED POE, Texas

DAVID G. REICHERT, Washington

CONNIE MACK, Florida

JOHN R. ‘RANDY’ KUHL, JR., New York

LUIS G. FORTUN ̃ O, Puerto Rico

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

CHARLES W. BOUSTANY, JR., Louisiana

VACANCY

JAMES L. OBERSTAR, Minnesota

NICK J. RAHALL, II, West Virginia

PETER A. DEFAZIO, Oregon

JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

JERROLD NADLER, New York

ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey

CORRINE BROWN, Florida

BOB FILNER, California

EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas

GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi

JUANITA MILLENDER-MCDONALD,

California

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California

BILL PASCRELL, JR., New Jersey

LEONARD L. BOSWELL, Iowa

TIM HOLDEN, Pennsylvania

BRIAN BAIRD, Washington

SHELLEY BERKLEY, Nevada

JIM MATHESON, Utah

MICHAEL M. HONDA, California

RICK LARSEN, Washington

MICHAEL E. CAPUANO, Massachusetts

ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York

JULIA CARSON, Indiana

TIMOTHY H. BISHOP, New York

MICHAEL H. MICHAUD, Maine

LINCOLN DAVIS, Tennessee

BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri

ALLYSON Y. SCHWARTZ, Pennsylvania

JOHN T. SALAZAR, Colorado

(II)
SUBCOMMITTEE ON WATER RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee, Chairman

SHERWOOD L. BOEHLERT, New York

WAYNE T. GILCHREST, Maryland

VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

SUE W. KELLY, New York

RICHARD H. BAKER, Louisiana

ROBERT W. NEY, Ohio

GARY G. MILLER, California

HENRY E. BROWN, JR., South Carolina

BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania

JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas

JIM GERLACH, Pennsylvania

TOM OSBORNE, Nebraska

TED POE, Texas

CONNIE MACK, Florida

LUIS G. FORTUN ̃ O, Puerto Rico

CHARLES W. BOUSTANY, JR., Louisiana,

Vice-Chair

VACANCY

DON YOUNG, Alaska

(Ex Officio)

EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas

ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey

JOHN T. SALAZAR, Colorado

JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois

GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi

BRIAN BAIRD, Washington

TIMOTHY H. BISHOP, New York

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

ALLYSON Y. SCHWARTZ, Pennsylvania

EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California

BILL PASCRELL, JR., New Jersey

RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri

NICK J. RAHALL, II, West Virginia

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

JAMES L. OBERSTAR, Minnesota

(Ex Officio)

(III)

(V)

CONTENTS

TESTIMONY

Page

Graham, John H., Jr., Assistant Director, Water Quality Control Department,

Maryville, Tennessee ........................................................................................... 12

Hall, John C., President, Hall and Associates ...................................................... 12

Olivieri, Dr. Adam W., Principal Engineer, Vice President, EOA, Inc. .............. 12

Rose, Dr. Joan B., Homer Nowlin Chair in Water Research, Department

of Fisheries and Wildlife, Michigan State University ....................................... 12

Stoner, Nancy, Director, Clean Water Project, Natural Resources Defense

Council .................................................................................................................. 12

Stupak, Hon. Bart, a Member of Congress from Michigan .................................. 1

Vicory, Alan H., Jr., Executive Director and Chief Engineer, Ohio River

Valley Water Sanitation Commission ................................................................. 12

PREPARED STATEMENT SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Costello, Hon. Jerry F., of Illinois .......................................................................... 38

Kelly, Hon. Sue, of New York ................................................................................. 84

Miller, Hon. Gary G., of California ........................................................................ 85

Stupak, Hon. Bart, of Michigan .............................................................................. 112

PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED BY WITNESSES

Graham, John H., Jr. .............................................................................................. 40

Hall, John C. ............................................................................................................ 44

Olivieri, Dr. Adam W. .............................................................................................. 86

Rose, Dr. Joan B. ..................................................................................................... 98

Stoner, Nancy ........................................................................................................... 104

Vicory, Alan H., Jr. .................................................................................................. 115

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD

American Public Works Association, Peter B. King, Executive Director, letter,

April 12, 2005 ....................................................................................................... 120

Arkansas Municipal League, Don A. Zimmerman, Executive Director, letter,

April 12, 2005 ....................................................................................................... 121

Arkansas Water Environment Association, Roy Reed, Chair, letter, April 8,

2005 ....................................................................................................................... 123

Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies, Ken Kirk, Executive Director,

April 8, 2005 ......................................................................................................... 125

Association of Ohio Metropolitan Wastewater Agencies, Michael L.

McGlinchy, President, April 11, 2005 ................................................................. 129

California Water Environment Association, Steven Agor, President, April 8,

2005 ....................................................................................................................... 130

Central States Water Environment Association, Inc., James P. Roth, letter,

April 12, 2005 ....................................................................................................... 131

Carneys Point Township Sewerage Authority, Paul Reed, Chairman, letter,

April 12, 2005 ....................................................................................................... 132

City of Cheboygan, Gary Good, Superintendent, Cheyboygan, MI, letter, April

12, 2005 ................................................................................................................. 134

City of Dayton, Frank Welch, City Manager, Dayton, TN, letter, April 7,

2005 ....................................................................................................................... 135

City of Dayton Wastewater Treatment Plant, Glenn A. Fraley, Superintendent, Dayton, TN, letter, April 7, 2005 ................................................................ 137

City of Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, Victor M. Mercado, Director,

fact sheet and letter, April 8, 2005 ..................................................................... 139
Page

VI

City of Hohenwald, Bob Burklow, Mayor, Hohenwald, TN, letter, April 7,

2005 ....................................................................................................................... 00142

City of Independence, Water Pollution Control Department, Dick Champion,

Jr., Director, April 11, 2005 ................................................................................ 144

City of Lewisburg, Larry E. Jones, Superintendent, letter, April 7, 2005 .......... 145

City of Pulaski, Daniel M. Speer, Mayor, Pulaski, TN, letter, April 6, 2005 ..... 147

City of San Leandro, Dean Wilson, Plant Manager, Water Pollution Control

Division, San Leandro, CA, letter, April 8, 2005 ............................................... 149

City of Vancouver, Brian K. Carlson, Public Works Director, letter, April

15, 2005 ................................................................................................................. 150

Coalition for Clean Water, Edwin A. Thorpe, Executive Director, letter, April

8, 2005 ................................................................................................................... 151

East Bay Dischargers Authority, Jennifer Toy, Chair, letter, April 8, 2006 ...... 152

First Utility District of Knox County, TN, Ralph McCarter, General Manger,

letter, April 12, 2005 ............................................................................................ 153

Florida Water Environment Association Utility Council, Raymond E. Hanson,

President, letter, April 7, 2005 ........................................................................... 154

Genesee County Drain Commissioner’s Office, Joseph M. Goergen, Plant Manager, letter, April 12, 2005 .................................................................................. 155

Greater Lawrence Sanitary District, Richard Hogan, Executive Director, letter, April 11, 2005 ................................................................................................ 156

Indiana Association of Cities and Towns, Matthew C. Greller, Executive Director, letter .......................................................................................................... 158

Indiana Water Environment Association, Herbert L. Corn, President, April

12, 2005 ................................................................................................................. 159

Iowa Water Pollution Control Association, Carla J. Schumacher, President,

letter, April 12, 2005 ............................................................................................ 160

Joint Meeting of Essex and Union Counties, Samuel T. McGhee, Executive

Director, letter, April 8, 2005 .............................................................................. 161

Kansas Water Environment Association, Martha Tasker, President, letter,

April 11, 2005 ....................................................................................................... 163

Knoxville Utilites Board, Bill R. Elmore, Senior Vice President and Chief

Operating Officer, letter, April 6, 2005 and letter, Mintha E. Roach, Acting

President and CEO, January 8, 2004 ................................................................. 166

Maryland Association of Municipal Wastewater Agencies, Inc., Julie Pippel,

President, letter, April 12, 2005 ......................................................................... 00171

Michigan Water Environment Association, William Gramlich, President, letter, April 13, 2005 ................................................................................................ 172

Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, Kevin L. Shafer, Executive Director, letters, April 12, 2005, and February 9, 2004 ............................................. 173

Minnesota Environemntal Science and Economic Review Board, Bruce A,

Nelson, President, April 11, 2005 ....................................................................... 181

National Fisheries Institute, John Connelly, President, letter, April 27, 2005 .. 183

Natural Resources Defense Council Advocacy Center, statement ....................... 185

Nemura, Adrienne Denise, P.E., Technical Review of the Katonak-Rose Report on Public Health Risks Associated with Wastewater Blending, and

Errors and Inappropriate Inferences Associated between Waterbourne Disease Outbreaks and Blended Effluent in the Katonak-Rose Report ................ 195

New Jersey Water Environment Association, Henry Penley, President, letter,

April 8, 2005 ......................................................................................................... 206

New York Water Environment Association, Inc., John R. Amend, President,

letter, April 12, 2005 ............................................................................................ 208

North Carolina American Water Works Association, Mike E. Richardson,

Chairman, letter, April 12, 2005 ......................................................................... 209

Pennsylvania Municipal Authorities Association, John W. Brosious, Deputy

Director, letter ...................................................................................................... 210

Pennsylvania Water Environment Association, letter, April 11, 2005 ................ 212

Reply Brief of Intervenor Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies,

Case No. 04-5073 .................................................................................................. 213

San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Thomas J. Franza, Assistant General Manager, Wastewater Enterprise, letter, April 12, 2005 .......................... 225

Somerset Raritan Valley Sewerage Authority, Glen D. Petrauski, Executive

Director, letter, April 4, 2005 .............................................................................. 226

South Carolina Water Quality Association, Inc., Andy Fairey, President, letter, April 12, 2005 ................................................................................................ 228

Texas Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies, Sharon Hayes, President, Letter, April 12, 2005 ................................................................................. 229
Page

VII

Urban Areas Coalition, letter, April 15, 2005 ....................................................... 230

Virginia Association of Municipal Wastewater Agencies, Inc., Mark A. Haley,

President, letter, April 12, 2005 ......................................................................... 232

Washington-East Washington Joint Authority, R.A. Dami, Executive Director,

letter, April 8, 2005 .............................................................................................. 234

Water Environment Services, a Department of Clackmas County, Oregon,

R. Kent Squires, Director, letter, April 12, 2005 ............................................... 236

Wayne County , Robert A. Ficano, County Executive, Detroit, MI, letter,

April 11, 2005 ....................................................................................................... 238

Water Environment Federation, statement ........................................................... 240

West County Agency, E.J. Shalaby, Manager, letter, April 8, 2005 .................... 247

West Bay County Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant, Kenneth C. Schott,

Plant Superintendent, letter, April 12, 2005 ..................................................... 248

West Virginia Municipal Water Quality Association, David Sago, President,

letter, April 12, 2005 ............................................................................................ 250

Twenty-eight Organizations in support of a final U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Clean Water Act blending policy, January 21, 2005 .................... 251

(1)

WASTEWATER BLENDING

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON TRANSPOR- TATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON

WATER RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:00 a.m., in Room

2167, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John J. Duncan, Jr.

[chairman of the subcommittee], presiding.

Mr. DUNCAN. I want to call this subcommittee meeting of the

Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee to order. We

have a very distinguished panel of witnesses that we will hear from

shortly, but in order to get our colleague, Congressman Stupak, on

the way and because we have a chance to discuss these issues and

ask questions of our colleagues later on the Floor and at other

times, we generally don’t ask questions of our member panels.

Ms. Johnson and I have agreed, before we even give our opening

statements, to let Bart go ahead and give his statement and then

proceed. Then, Bart, you’re welcome to stay with us, but we know

that you have many, many other things on your schedule. So you

may proceed and give the first opening statement in regard to this

hearing here this morning.

TESTIMONY OF HONORABLE BART STUPAK, A MEMBER IN

CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF MICHIGAN

Mr. STUPAK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member

Johnson, thank you for the courtesy. I am just down the hall at a

markup on the Energy bill that’s been going on the third day. So

that’s been getting a little contentious, so I would like to get back

there.

But I really want to thank you for holding this hearing on wastewater blending. My staff will be here, because as I said, I won’t be

able to stay. Because I would really be interested in hearing from

those who support the EPA’s proposed policy to dump inadequately

treated human waste into our waters, a practice that the EPA refers to as blending.

I guess having worked on this issue for a while now, I anticipate

they will probably argue that blending effluent will meet effluent

limitations outlined in their discharge permits, or that the costs

that will be incurred if blending is not allowed to continue will be

astronomical, and that blending is legal, safe and a commonly used

practice in this Country.

But you know, for 30 years, since the Clean Water Act, we’ve

been working hard as a Country, we’ve spent billions of dollars to
2

clean up our Nation’s treatment of water and wastewater in particular. And I just don’t want to turn back the clock on 30 years

of progress we have made. That’s really what it comes down to,

when you take a look at this blending policy.

If finalized, it would effectively lift the current prohibition, and

the current prohibition on bypassing a crucial secondary phase in

treating human waste before it is discharged out into our rivers,

our lakes, our streams. Because that second the viruses, the parasites that enter our waterways and our drinking water. It’s just as

simple as this, people don’t want to drink water that has only been

partially treated against these pathogens and viruses and parasites

from waste.

Those who support the EPA proposed blending policy may argue

that the secondary treatment will be safe because the final effluent

will still meet discharge standards at the end of the pipe. Well,

even if blending sewage meets the end of the pipe discharge limit,

it still is the increase of human risk to human health and to the

environment. If you look at the current Federal standards, I know

this Committee is very familiar with them, there are very few

standards that exist for at the end of the pipe. The proposed policy

would allow treatment plants to meet these few standards that are

on the books by trying to do a massive dilution of sewage with

storm water instead of providing effective treatment.

If you take a look at the history of this policy, it was first proposed in 1984 under President Reagan. The Congress and President Reagan said, we don’t accept this. It was then proposed again,

to do blending in the Clinton Administration. It was rejected there.

Well, we’re back here now to November of 2003, when the EPA

once again is proposing blending.

The EPA regulations are clear. And they define a bypass as, ‘‘the

intentional diversion of waste streams from any portion of a treatment facility and secondary treatment of human waste is clearly a

part of the treatment facility. In fact, secondary treatment is the

core of the sewage treatment process.’’

Current regulations say that the general prohibition on bypassing secondary treatment has an exception. In rare situations where

a treatment facility is likely to be damaged or public health is to

be harmed or repair to the system to accommodate and fully treat

heavy flows cannot be accomplished. If we are going to allow this,

facilities should be forced to do a feasibility study on a case-by-case

basis rather than just change the rule in all wastewater treatment

plants, or at least those municipal wastewater treatment plants,

would fall underneath this change.

If you take a look at it, and I’m on the Great Lakes and we all

protect our water resources, no matter what State we are, but I’m

in the Great Lakes. If you take a look at places like Milwaukee,

Cleveland, Toronto, Chicago and others, and Detroit, are dumping

billions of gallons of partially treated sewage into our Great Lakes.

There was one day last July where 400 cities along the Great

Lakes, 400 of them, discharged sewage into our Great Lakes, partially treated sewage. That’s 400 cities. Releases are frequent, and

under the EPA’s proposal, they will become more frequent.

In 2004, and this is according to preliminary data we have, Detroit released wastewater which contained some form of sewage
3

400 times. That’s more than once a day. Four hundred times, just

Detroit alone. And Detroit has, I’m not here to knock Detroit, but

they have also spent, in trying to improve their system, they have

spent now close to a billion dollars trying to improve upon it.

In Michigan, not only is the Great Lakes the world’s largest body

of fresh water, but it hurts our tourism, it hurts our fishing industry, which is a large industry, and human health is a big concern.

Back in 1993, I was in Congress, as I think most of you were with

me, Milwaukee had a cryptosporidius outbreak that occurred in

Milwaukee. Over 100 people died, over 400,000 people became ill.

The parasite that caused this illness, cryptosporidium, is not effectively removed if you do not have the secondary treatment process.

So we should not be bypassing. Milwaukee is a good example on

why we should not do this.

And I know Milwaukee has taken great steps to try to alleviate

their concerns. But this is what’s going to happen if we allow

blending.

Myself, Congressman Pallone, Congressman Shaw, Congressman

Kirk and 132 others of our colleagues signed a letter to the EPA

earlier this year urging them not to proceed with this blending proposal. Democrats and Republicans joined in and said, don’t do this

blending proposal. On March 3rd, Congressman Shaw, Congressman Pallone, Congressman Gilchrest, Congressman Kirk and others representing States from coast to coast, came and we introduced legislation called Save Our Waters from Sewage Act, H.R.

1126. We right now have 77 bipartisan co-sponsors. Our legislation

would just prevent the EPA from finalizing the blending policy.

Mr. Chairman, I can go on and on and on. I’ll wrap it up just

by saying, if we take a look at the President’s budget, and not casting stones here, because Congress has the ultimate responsibility

here to pass the budget and put the money in. But we see one-third

cut in the Clean Water Revolving Loan funds, we see other cuts in

the Safe Drinking Water Revolving Loans. And I know it’s a tight

year. But the health, and for the good of our economy and the

health of our American people, I hope we can replace these cuts

and not allow this proposal to go through, this blending proposal.

I think it’s dangerous for our environment, but especially for our

human health.

With that, I see I have gone over my time. I appreciate your

courtesy. If there are any questions, I will be happy to try to answer them.

Mr. DUNCAN. Well, Bart, as I said earlier, we generally have a

policy in this Subcommittee of not having questions to members, as

a courtesy to all of our witnesses who have come in from around

the country. And because we also have a chance to ask you questions later on. But certainly you are one of our outstanding members and I appreciate very much your concern on this issue. For all

the reasons that you’ve stated, that’s why we’re starting to look

into this.

Do you have anything you wish to say, Ms. Johnson?

Ms. JOHNSON. No, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. DUNCAN. Okay, well, thank you for coming.

Mr. STUPAK. And thank you for having a hearing shortly after

we introduced the legislation. I appreciate it.
4

Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you.

I want to welcome everyone to our hearing today on wastewater

blending. As most people know, there is a great deal of confusion,

even at times misinformation about this issue. My goal today is to

have a balanced discussion and hopefully come to some reasonable

conclusions about when blending is appropriate and when it is not.

Some people say that blending is bad because it involves diverting part of a treatment plant’s excess water around its biological

treatment unit. Then also, we will have one of our expert witnesses

today who says blending protects public health and the environment by increasing wet weather wastewater plant capacity and

thereby significantly reducing raw sewage overflows into streams

and potentially into homes.

So there you have sort of both sides of the equation. Currently

in some parts of the Country, States issue permits that allow

wastewater treatment plants to discharge blended wastewater during periods of heavy rain or snow melt. Some of these permits also

impose conditions requiring additional treatment of this wastewater. All of these permits require the wastewater treatment plant

to meet all applicable Clean Water Act standards before it discharges blended wastewater into a river or lake. That requirement

is already in the law.

In other parts of the Country, States cannot issue permits that

allow blending because the EPA region will veto the permit. That

is the situation in Tennessee. There has been a change of a rule

that was in effect for 26 years and a regulation that was in effect

for 20 years. So when you have one EPA region saying one thing

and one EPA region saying another, that leads of course to some

of the confusion and misunderstanding that there is on this issue

and that’s what this hearing hopefully is about here this morning.

What this means in Tennessee and many other States is that

wastewater treatment plants may have to build additional treatment capacity and additional storage capacity, which could cost

over $100 million at a single plant, even for small cities. That kind

of expenditure is almost impossible to handle for some, to require

this expenditure to handle heavy wastewater flows that occur

sometimes only once or twice a year.

This is a very important issue. Around the Country, it is estimated that at a minimum, $80 billion, maybe as much as $200 billion of additional infrastructure will have to be built if wastewater

blending is not allowed. That’s a lot of money. Where are we going

to come up with all that, with all these other needs? People are

going to have to explain that, I would say.

Since I announced this hearing, I have received over 50 letters

from communities in 22 States all over the Country--Missouri, Arkansas, Ohio, California, Illinois, Michigan, Tennessee, Florida,

Massachusetts, Indiana, New Jersey, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, expressing support for the practice of blending and asking for

help to ensure that blending remains a wastewater management

tool.

My goal today is first, to help people understand what blending

is. Very few people even understand what it is. I’ve heard some

people compare blending to the discharge of raw sewage. That’s not
5

true. Blending simply means that less than 100 percent of the

wastewater flow receives biological treatment before it is discharged. All the wastewater flow receives some treatment, and all

the wastewater meets Clean Water Act standards before it is discharged. All the wastewater meets Clean Water Act standards before it is discharged.

Secondly, I would like to have a balanced discussion of whether

or not blending is a practice that is protective of human health and

the environment. Some argue that blended wastewater will have

more pathogens, as we just heard Congressman Stupak say. Others

argue that this is not true.

Third, I would like a balanced discussion of whether or not

blending is legal under the Clean Water Act. This relates back to

the confusion between the regions that I just mentioned a few moments ago. Some argue that blending is an illegal bypass around

treatment. Others argue that it is legitimate plant design and point

out that the Clean Water Act does not dictate plant design.

Finally, I would like the witnesses to help us look for a solution

to resolve all the controversy and uncertainty surrounding blending

and surrounding this issue. I expect each of our witnesses today

can agree that a wastewater treatment plant can be designed in a

way that allows wastewater to receive protective and cost-effective

treatment, even if not all the wastewater goes through a biological

treatment unit.

If that is the case, we should not be talking about prohibiting

blending, we should be talking about the circumstances and conditions under which blending is appropriate and when it is not.

I want to hear from each witness about how we can reach a consensus so that blending can hopefully in some way be a win-win

both for public health and the communities.

Now let me turn things over to our very distinguished Ranking

Member, Ms. Johnson.

Ms. JOHNSON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for holding

this hearing today on the practice of blending under the Clean

Water Act.

There are two questions that should be answered regarding

blending. One is, is it permissible under the Clean Water Act and

its implementing regulations; and two, is it protective of human

health and the environment. To both questions, there is no agreement. Within the Environmental Protection Agency there is disagreement over whether blending is authorized under the Clean

Water Act regulations. EPA has not taken a uniform position

around the Country.

Unfortunately, we will not hear from them today and their views.

Perhaps though in the future EPA could explain its position to the

Committee and eliminate some of the confusion that surrounds the

issue.

Let me talk about what we know and what we do not know

about sewage blending. We know that blending is conducted in

some areas of the Country and prohibited in others. We know that

there are insufficient data as to whether blending is protective of

human health and the environment. We know that the Nation does

not have the resources to provide full treatment of every drop of

water, 100 percent of the time, and that there will be times when
6

less than full treatment is allowed, such as under the current bypass rules.

We know that while blending may or may not cause an increase

in the concentration of pathogens and other pollutants, it certainly

increases the total mass of those pollutants in receiving waters. We

know that blending is a distinct issue from both the elimination of

combined sewage overflow and storm water discharges. Blending

involves sanitary sewers and partially treated sewage. We know

that the Clean Water Act allows EPA to define by regulation the

technology-based standard that constitutes secondary treatment.

But we do not know whether blending is consistent with that

standard.

We know that a major cause of extremely high flow is infiltration

inflow from aging collection systems. As systems age, infiltration

inflow has a tendency to increase. We know that while communities are addressing infrastructure needs, they continue to face a

funding gap in excess of $300 billion over the next 20 years. And

clearly, we need to focus on reducing infiltration inflow and minimize the instances by which any bypass should be necessary.

If nothing else, I believe that today’s hearing will demonstrate

that the cuts in Federal spending for wastewater infrastructure are

extremely ill-advised. Worldwide, someone who is ill because of polluted water occupies every second hospital bed. Six thousand children die every day from an illness caused by the lack of sanitary

facilities.

People think that that cannot happen here. Yet in the last decade, 104 people died and over 400,000 became ill because of the

cryptosporidium in Milwaukee’s drinking water. And it’s present in

the waste stream and highly resistant to disinfectants such as chlorine.

Secondary treatment is the best way to reduce the introduction

of cryptosporidium from wastewater treatment plants. Mr. Chairman, clean water and safe water is a right for every American. We

should tread cautiously where any action could imperil this precious resource. I look forward to hearing the witnesses, though I’m

in a markup in another committee, I might have to dash out. But

I thank the witnesses for being here and thank you for the hearing.

Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Ms. Johnson. Does anyone

else have a statement they wish to make? Mr. Gilchrest.

Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a markup on

the Energy bill in the Resources Committee. So after my statement

I am going to have to leave.

Mr. DUNCAN. Well, I’ll tell you, we’re all in that situation. I’ve

got markups going in two other committees. It’s a busy, busy day.

Mr. GILCHREST. Maybe I’ll just stay here, and I won’t have to

worry about the votes.

[Laughter.]

Mr. DUNCAN. Go ahead.

Mr. GILCHREST. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am going to address specifically the issue of the Chesapeake

Bay and the Chesapeake Bay watershed and blending. One of the

problems in the Chesapeake Bay is that it is extremely shallow, extremely fragile and extremely vulnerable to human activity. The

biggest problem in the bay, and there are a lot of problems, I think
7

we should outlaw during this next markup, Mr. Chairman, cigarette boats and big power boats, because not only are they noisy,

they create a great deal of disturbance with the sediment in the

water. But that’s for another day.

The nitrogen is a key issue to the degradation of the Chesapeake

Bay. What we’re doing now is ensuring that all plants have biological nutrient removal mechanisms. In the next few years, we’re

going to enhance that. There is well over a million pounds of nitrogen that gets flushed into the bay ever year. And we have targeted

sewage treatment plants. The next will deal with the conservation

efforts of agriculture, we’re dealing with storm water runoff and so

on. We have a plan over the next ten years to deal specifically with

nitrogen.

It seems to me that if we use blending, it reduces the incentive

and the motivation to target that specific nutrient of nitrogen. We

get nitrogen from the air, we get nitrogen from agriculture, storm

water runoff. Specifically the easiest fix for nitrogen in the short

run is sewage treatment plants.

I look forward to further discussions on this. I certainly would

like to talk to the witnesses as we go along. Because if you can

show me that blending will help us stay on track with reducing nitrogen by 30 million pounds a year, that’s our goal, take that right

out of the system, then I’ll go along with this program.

But I don’t see how blending, with releasing, the old saying in

the 1960s was, the solution to pollution is dilution, maybe that’s

delusionary, I don’t know. And I’m not sure if I said that right.

But in this case, nitrogen is water soluble. That baby just goes

right through there, and I don’t see how blending can reduce the

amount of nitrogen that goes into the Chesapeake Bay. So I look

forward to working with EPA on this issue. It may work in some

other place, but it’s really difficult for me to see how it would work

in the Chesapeake Bay.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Gilchrest. Anybody else? All right.

We go by seniority first, so I’ll go—did you have a statement, Mr.

Pascrell? All right, go ahead.

Mr. PASCRELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

This issue of wastewater blending, and I want to associate myself

with many of the remarks that the gentleman from Maryland just

expressed. This is not an easy issue. I’m sorry we don’t have the

EPA here to have dialogue, but obviously there’s a reason for that.

I think that we can come to some conclusions here that would,

maybe I’m foolish enough to think this, that would satisfy the environmental community as well as the EPA and the Congress, more

important. I think that’s possible. The reason why I think it’s possible is that the Chairman of this Committee has been the main

reason for the fairness of the Committee. I say what I mean usually, right?

There’s no question that all of the communities out there that

are struggling to meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act do

not have the resources to do that, and you know, we’ve struggled

over this, we’ve authorized. We still don’t have appropriations. This

is serious business. Then when we look at the budget, hundreds of

billions of dollars are needed to meet the real and pressing needs.
8

So I must be honest with you, today if there was a vote taken,

I couldn’t support the process of blending. But I believe we could

come to a conclusion whereby it is acceptable under very specific

standards. I think we can do this. And I think the gentleman from

Maryland set the pace. The money to make upgrades must come

from somewhere, though. It’s not going to fall out of the sky. The

state of the communities and the state of the States is not very

good.

So we have to step up to the plate, since apparently the state of

the Union is so terrific. Or is it?

But we have to find the money to do this. I think this is a priority. We’ve made clean water a priority, Mr. Chairman, and I have

faith in the direction you bring us in. But I hope that the EPA will

have dialogue with us and not simply hand something down.

Thank you.

Mr. DUNCAN. Well, we will have the EPA here at another time,

if we have some interest. But we just have this panel, in fact, I

think a very balanced panel of all sides here for this hearing today

so we can all learn more about this.

Ms. Tauscher, did you wish to make a statement?

Ms. TAUSCHER. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for

holding this hearing today on an issue which I know is of importance to all of our constituents, and thank you for allowing me the

opportunity to make a brief statement.

The need to ensure clean water and protect our Nation’s waterways from harmful discharge, including inadequately treated sewage, should be of paramount importance to all of us. First, and

while it may not be the main concern of this morning’s hearing, I

believe that today’s discussion of blending would be well served if

it also included a discussion of Federal infrastructure financing and

funding. We have done less than an adequate job in ensuring that

Federal financing is available to meet the growing water infrastructure needs of this Nation. Unfortunately, the trend continues

this year.

Under the fiscal year 2006 budget, the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, the Federal funding which is responsible for assisting with infrastructure development, will be decreased by $370 million. At a time when every infrastructure dollar is valuable and we

are asking our publicly-owned treatment works to meet stringent

clean water standards, the Federal Government cannot abandon its

role as partner in this process.

Mr. Chairman, I have worked with my good friend Sue Kelly on

infrastructure financing in the past. I look forward to continued efforts with her and my colleagues on the Subcommittee. Briefly, Mr.

Chairman, like many of our colleagues and like a number of the

panelists here today, I believe that the EPA’s proposed blending

policy is overly broad, and I fear that it may lead to the use of

blending as a too-common practice. Our guidance on blending

should be derived from the Clean Water Act itself, which states

that an operator may bypass secondary treatment if it is, ‘‘unavoidable to prevent loss of life, personal injury or severe property damage’’ which includes ‘‘damage to treatment facilities which causes

them to become inoperable.’’
9

Blending should never be a common practice. I also understand

that across the Nation, responsible POTWs have made substantial

infrastructure investments to address the negative effects of wet

weather events. In my own district, investments of more than $650

million have been made to build wet weather storage facilities and

address the issue of infiltration and inflow into the system due to

rainfall, snow melt and resulting high groundwater levels. We

must protect both these investments and our duty to clean water

by ensuring that blending does not become a common practice, but

in extremely limited circumstances, a final way to address serious

inflows.

Of course, Mr. Chairman, I believe we all agree that our goal

should be to end the practice of blending in order to ensure clean

water. I look forward to today’s panelists addressing the technological and infrastructure needs, which will allow all of us to move

to that standard.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time. Thank you.

Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much.

Mrs. Schwartz.

Mrs. SCHWARTZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding this hearing today, and I appreciate again the opportunity to

share some opening comments.

I also wanted to acknowledge our colleague, Bart Stupak, who

has taken such a leadership role on addressing the concerns many

of us share about the proposed changes that are being made by the

EPA. I think a number of us here represent areas, if not all of us,

that have river ways, streams and really are very deeply concerned

about what this change could mean to our districts.

Certainly the concerns about the discharge of large amounts of

untreated sewage in the event of what seems like a very general

category of wet weather is something that many of us are really

concerned about. I look forward to the panel and hearing what they

have to say.

After 30 years of really active work on cleaning up our waterways under the Clean Water Act, we have been able to not only

protect the health of Americans by guaranteeing better, cleaner

water, but I know in Pennsylvania we have just seen enormous opportunities from cleaner rivers and cleaner streams. That relates to

of course recreation and the kind of fishing that’s come back.

We’ve seen rivers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia being used for

recreation and for economic development in ways that were really

unimaginable given the unsafe, the lack of safety in the water four

years ago. Lake Erie is completely different, and the city of Erie

would tell you that, that the opportunities there are really enormous. I see that in my own district and in the Delaware riverfront

some of the opportunities that exist now because it is cleaner and

healthier.

Having said that, there are over 9,000 miles of rivers, lakes and

streams in Pennsylvania that are considered too polluted to be safe

for fishing or swimming. So the possibility that we might in fact

be moving backwards rather than moving forward and being able

to guarantee a safer waterways and safer water is really something

that concerns me greatly.
10

Let me also state one other point. We have also seen, and Pennsylvania has an aging infrastructure in water and sewer. As a

State senator, we addressed some of this in trying to provide some

funding for replacement of some of these aging systems. But having

said that, we know that we have actually put in, I know the city

of Philadelphia has put in large sums of dollars to improve the

water and sewer infrastructure. What we don’t also want to do is

to set a standard where we end up saying we’re going to discourage

those kinds of investments and in fact create incentives for any

local community that has failed to do that. That would be moving

in the absolutely wrong direction.

Interesting little side note, Philadelphia actually had one of the

earliest leaders in water treatment, its water works. We have just

renovated it for historic purposes, you can come visit it on the

Schulkyll River. We really were leading the way in the early 19th

century on some of the ways we’ve treated our water. So I don’t

want to see us go backwards, either because of the effect on the

health of our constituents, the health of all Americans, or the opportunity to use our river ways for recreation and economic development.

So my questions for the panel will really be simply, how this

moves us forward in guaranteeing clean water for the American

public. If it moves us backwards, that certainly is the wrong direction. So I look forward to the panel and to the questions we will

have an opportunity to ask.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. DUNCAN. Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Schwartz.

We are going to go ahead and ask the panel to start taking their

seats. Oh, Ms. Norton.

Ms. NORTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have only a few brief

words to say. The subject is of special interest to me. If there are

any real shortcuts, I’d like to hear them. because this region has

one of the worst storm water overflow problems, I’m sure, in the

United States. It comes because the system was originally built by

the Corps of Engineers, we face a billion dollar problem.

Frankly, there’s blending, all right, the kind of blending we don’t

want, it’s the kind of blending we’re afraid of. Because when the

water just overflows, there it goes into the Anacostia and the Potomac, ultimately into the Chesapeake Bay. Obviously if there was

a shortcut that worked, that was not a threat to waterways and to

water, everybody would embrace that.

One really wonders if you can get around, yes, the very costly

process of renewing our water infrastructure, which was often

built, sometimes a century ago. For most localities in the United

States, it’s very old. When roads get to be old, you recognize that

at some point they have to be fixed or reconstructed or paved. That

is not the way we have dealt with the infrastructure for our water.

I must say, you will find me very skeptical that blending is a

shortcut that preserves the health of the American people and that

preserves the health of our waterways. If there is a shortcut, despite my skepticism, I will be very open to considering it.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you very much, Ms. Norton.
11

As most of you know, the American Society of Civil Engineers recently graded the condition of the infrastructure throughout the

country. They gave the wastewater infrastructure a grade of D

minus. Ms. Johnson mentioned the estimated cost of the needs, the

CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, the EPA and the Water Infrastructure Network estimated that the gap between current

spending and needs investment could be as high as $200 billion or

more over the next 20 years. Of course, Ms. Johnson referred to an

even higher estimate.

The problem is, much of this infrastructure is underground, and

people just do not realize that the aging that Ms. Norton talked

about.

I read four or five years ago, a column that said you could put

every family of four in the State of Texas and give them three acres

of land each and leave the whole rest of the Country totally empty.

It’s just impossible to comprehend how huge this Country is and

how much land there is, how much open space there is. But having

said that, everybody is still moving out of the rural areas, because

they say they want land, but they really don’t. They want to be

near the malls and the movie theaters. So most of our urban areas

around the country are having these tremendous population increases, and increasing greatly the demands on the system.

We passed a couple of years ago in this Committee, because this

Committee was involved with it, in its origination, a combination

of the Clean Water Act. As the New Republic Magazine pointed out

about four years ago, the air and the water are both much, much

cleaner than they were 30 years ago. We have made tremendous

progress.

But because of these increasing demands and the aging infrastructure, we have to continue to do more and do better. That’s

what this hearing is about.

So I’m very pleased to introduce a very distinguished panel. We

have Mr. Alan H. Vicory, Executive Director and Chief Engineer of

the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, from Cincinnati, Ohio; we have Mr. John H. Graham, Jr., Assistant Director

of Water Quality Control Department, Maryville, Tennessee, in my

district, one of my bosses. Glad to have you here, Mr. Graham.

Dr. Joan B. Rose, Homer Nowlin Chair in Water Research, of the

Department of Fisheries and Wildlife from Michigan State University in Lansing, Michigan; Dr. Adam W. Olivieri, Principal Engineer and Vice President, EOA, Inc.; Ms. Nancy Stoner, Director of

the Clean Water Project for the Natural Resources Defense Council

here in Washington, D.C.; and Mr. John C. Hall, President of Hall

and Associates, also here in Washington.

We certainly appreciate all of you taking time out from your busy

schedules to come and be with us. We always proceed in the order

the panelists are listed on the call of the hearing. That means, Mr.

Vicory, you may go first. Your full statements will be placed in the

record. All the committees and subcommittees, I think, in this Congress give the witnesses five minutes. We give the witnesses six

minutes, but we cut you off. We bang the gavel at that six minutes,

not to be impolite to you, but in consideration of the other witnesses.

So Mr. Vicory, you may begin.
12

TESTIMONY OF ALAN H. VICORY, JR., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

AND CHIEF ENGINEER, OHIO RIVER VALLEY WATER SANITATION COMMISSION; JOHN H. GRAHAM, JR., ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, WATER QUALITY CONTROL DEPARTMENT, MARYVILLE, TENNESSEE; DR. JOAN B. ROSE, HOMER NOWLIN

CHAIR IN WATER RESEARCH, DEPARTMENT OF FISHERIES

AND WILDLIFE, MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY; DR. ADAM W.

OLIVIERI, PRINCIPAL ENGINEER, VICE PRESIDENT, EOA,

INC.; NANCY STONER, DIRECTOR, CLEAN WATER PROJECT,

NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL; JOHN C. HALL,

PRESIDENT, HALL AND ASSOCIATES

Mr. VICORY. Thank you very much, Chairman Duncan and Congresswoman Johnson, Members of the Committee. I am pleased to

be here today to talk about the issue of wastewater blending from

a wastewater perspective. I think it’s good to start out to talk a little bit about my employer, ORSANCO is the acronym for the formal name that you’ve mentioned. ORSANCO is an interstate compact commission, established in 1948 to abate interstate water pollution. Signatories to the compact are all the States along the Ohio

River, some of which you mentioned earlier, as well as New York

and Virginia. ORSANCO’s board of commissioners are appointed by

the Governors to represent their respective States, and there are

several commissioners appointed by the President of the United

States to represent the Federal viewpoint.

Now, the compact under which we operate has been adopted in

each of the States’ laws and sanctioned by the U.S. Congress. As

such, it is an agency with regulatory powers on equal par with any

and all agencies that we work with, including U.S. EPA. Among

the powers of ORSANCO is to adopt standards of treatment for discharges to interstate streams in the Ohio Valley that the commission deems necessary to achieve the compact’s objectives.

Now, blending is a concept that’s not new to ORSANCO. In 1997,

this commission, after notice and public hearing, adopted in its regulatory requirements, and I have a copy here and I’d be glad to

submit that if you’re interested in it, adopted in its regulatory requirements the availability for blending to be practiced at municipal wastewater treatment plants, serving combined sewer areas

that have primary treatment in excess of secondary treatment capacity. Our regulations focus on maximizing the treatment of wet

weather flows from CSO systems, and thereby reducing the frequency and duration of sewer overflow events.

Blending facilities in our jurisdiction must be properly maintained, provide maximum flow-through secondary, and ultimately,

and I’d like to emphasize this one, meet Ohio River water quality

standards.

As the director of ORSANCO now for 18 years, I recall fairly vividly the discussions in 1996 about this issue. There really wasn’t

a great deal of discussion amongst the commissioners. There was

a pretty strong consensus that the prevailing feeling should be, in

our blending policy, as it states, the need to promote the maximum

amount of treatment and disinfection to the maximum amount of

flows. Otherwise, as our blending policy recognizes, untreated sewage, totally untreated sewage, could be released elsewhere in a

combined sewer system and water quality would suffer.
13

Now, ORSANCO, I think our track record in water pollution

stands on its own. This organization adopted secondary treatment

two years before the Federal Clean Water Act, and was instrumental in the science issue of bacterial standards for rivers. So our

track record, I think, in terms of being on the edge, if you will, in

water pollution control I think is there.

But our board of commissioners, inasmuch as they represent in

the body of 27 people, State agency representatives, State EPAs,

U.S. EPA is on the commission, water and wastewater utility administrators, folks from the legal profession, folks from industry,

that ORSANCO’s requirements focus themselves on the Ohio River,

a large stream, and tend to be a bit broader, and in a sense, pragmatic and broad-based in its concept. I think that’s important to

point out.

I think our policy that we have on the books speaks to this. And

again, if we did not have the policy in place, I think we would have

situations in some communities, at least, where if the flows were

not received for at least primary treatment they would be released

as combined sewer overflow structures elsewhere in the system.

And a concern would be, many of those sewer overflows would be

on smaller tributaries, which may present an even higher level of

public health risk.

In addition, if blending were not possible, I think it would probably exacerbate the already huge challenge that municipal treatment facilities have in trying to manage the avalanche of wet

weather flows that they typically receive, given the fact that we

have many older communities in the Ohio River area, Pittsburgh,

Cincinnati, Louisville, Wheeling, West Virginia. Among those four

communities alone we probably have upwards of a thousand combined sewer overflow points.

Now, ORSANCO doesn’t view blending as an expedient substitute for proper management of wastewater infrastructure, or of

wet weather flows. Blending is but one of a suite of integrated actions that communities need to be looking forward to and implementing at the end of the day by the best regime for managing wet

weather flows. Cincinnati alone is going to be spending a billion

and a half dollars over the next 20 years correcting its sewer overflow points. And so it’s just very important that we try to use the

facilities that we have to the maximum extent.

It’s important, I point out that this is a policy for the Ohio River.

It may not be best policy elsewhere. There’s lots of different regimes out there, and in my testimony I indicate some of the important questions that perhaps need to be reviewed, if you will, in the

context of looking at the possibility of blending and some of the

other areas. That’s there for the record.

I want to kind of sum up that there’s been some concern about

the possibility that blending being available might precipitate communities using that possibility cavalierly. My experience in working with wastewater treatment utilities on the Ohio River and nationally is that these people are professionals, this is what they do.

They really want to provide the maximum amount of treatment

that they possibly can, given the facilities that they have. And so

I conclude, again, with a word of thanks for the opportunity to pro-
14

vide this testimony and of course, will be available to answer any

questions at the proper time.

Mr. BOUSTANY. [Presiding] Mr. Vicory, we thank you for your

testimony and look forward to asking questions as we move forward.

Next, the Committee will entertain the testimony of Mr.

Graham. Mr. Graham is Assistant Director of the Water Quality

Control Department in Maryville, Tennessee. Welcome, Mr.

Graham.

Mr. GRAHAM. Good morning, Commissioner, and Chairman. I’d

like to thank you for allowing me to testify this morning, and I

greet you and the Committee members.

My name is Jack Graham, and I am the Assistant Director of the

Water Quality Control Department for the city of Maryville. I am

speaking for the city and also for the Tennessee Municipal League.

Thank you for holding this important hearing about blending.

Blending is a way of maximizing treatment and protecting the

public health. The misinformation on blending is substantial. To

help clarify that, I hope to discuss this morning how the issue

started, the impacts on our State and how the misinformation has

actually delayed the resolution of this issue.

Our wastewater plant, like many others, is designed to blend primary and biologically treated wastewaters to maximize the wet

weather flow that can safely be treated prior to disinfection and

discharge. By increasing wet weather plant capacity, blending significantly reduces those collection system overflows of raw sewage.

We meet the Clean Water Act permit limits for public health and

environmental safety in our discharges when blending. The blended

discharge is fully protective of the public health.

Blending ensures that the biological system within the plant,

which is sensitive to hydraulic changes, is also protected. Many

wastewater plants in Tennessee specifically incorporate blending

processes as part of their design and have received Federal grants

for construction.

Historically in Tennessee, in early 1999, without any public notice, EPA Region IV informed Tennessee that blending violated the

Clean Water Act’s secondary treatment bypass regulations. This

announcement came 20 years after the adoption of the regulations.

And based upon EPA Region IV’s position, the State began issuing

permits that prohibited blending. In June of 2000, EPA called a

public meeting in Chattanooga to inform us that blending was prohibited. It was a complete surprise, since EPA itself had approved

and funded some of the plants that blend. We found out later that

EPA headquarters here in Washington did not approve the Region

IV position.

The cost to eliminate blending, and we’ve done engineering studies on five local plants to us, is in excess of $127 million. Statewide,

it’s very much significantly higher. This is in addition to the monies we are already spending for infrastructure improvements to our

collection systems. A blending prohibition would not benefit the

public. Blended, in fact, blended effluent quality of our facility is

far better than the water that is currently in our receiving stream.

Given the massive costs and the lack of environmental benefit,

the Tennessee Municipal League requested that EPA headquarters
15

address this matter. EPA headquarters itself has sent a letter and

confirmed to Senator Frist and to all the Tennessee delegation that

the existing rules do not prohibit blending. Nonetheless, this issue

is unresolved.

Our ability as the city of Maryville to plan wastewater facility

improvements is at a standstill. We need to and want to design a

cost-effective plant expansion. We will meet the discharge limits,

we will treat all the flows reaching the plant and we need to protect the biological process. But we can’t proceed to get approval and

to complete the design until the ongoing regulatory confusion is

solved.

Blending must be resolved so that municipal facilities like ours

may continue to operate properly and to plan for the future. There

are several misconceptions that have come to light. First, the idea

that blending will decrease the efforts to maintain the infrastructure. Allowing blending affects the need for cities to invest in their

wastewater infrastructure, yes. But we have to control the water

that gets to our plant. You can’t just keep on expanding plants.

Blending allows you to handle the peak flows.

For example, Maryville spends $1.6 million in this coming year

on collection system improvements. And we are planning to spend

$12 million on a plant expansion. But we need to know what the

rules are to let us design that and complete it.

Second, many Congressional offices were informed by activist

groups that blending presents a public health threat, even when

the permit limits are met. Such claims are a basic attack on the

very structure of the Clean Water Act. Moreover, the statements

are false.

The Rose Report, issued by NRDC, was based upon a

mischaracterization of the Washington, Pennsylvania wastewater

plant operations. I know the manager, Ray Dami, and he confirmed

that many of the assumptions about plant operations were simply

wrong, and that no one from NRDC had ever visited the facility to

discuss its operations.

Mr. Dami’s correspondence confirms that his plant, first, does not

blend raw sewage; the disinfection process operates effectively during peak flows; and that the blended effluent that he discharges is

cleaner that the receiving stream. Pennsylvania generally recognizes that body contact recreation does not occur in cold weather.

The elderly and small children are not swimming under the conditions assumed in the Rose Report.

Third, some activist organizations have resorted to scare tactics,

using outrageous claims to trigger thousands of letters from the

general public against blending. Finally, if future research shows

that the existing wet weather treatment practices are of concern,

then we need to set tight standards with State output and let the

engineers and the plant operators tailor the solution to fit the local

conditions to meet the Clean Water Act requirements while taking

advantage of all the options out there, non-biological processes like

disinfection, chlorine or UV, as well as new, innovative technologies. We will get cleaner wastewater for our municipal dollars.

In summary, I would like to thank you all for inviting me to testify and stress that we need a solution to this issue to allow us to
16

proceed to treat the waters in the best way we can as professionals

in the wastewater industry.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Mr. Graham, thank you for your testimony.

The Committee will now hear testimony from Dr. Joan Rose, the

Homer Nowlin Chair in Water Research in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University, East Lansing,

Michigan. Welcome.

Ms. ROSE. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the

Committee.

I am a water pollution public health microbiologist. I have been

examining wastewater for pathogens for over 20 years. It includes

a whole array of different types of microorganisms. Microorganisms

actually fall into three categories; that is the bacteria, which include e-coli and are standard fecal coliform; includes the parasites,

cryptosporidium and giardia, and you’ve heard a bit about those;

and it includes viruses. That may include something like the Norwalk virus which has caused the cruise ship outbreaks on things

like coxsaki-B viruses.

These pathogens do cause disease when they contaminate drinking water. And they do cause disease when they contaminate recreational waters. And we know that our sensitive populations are

at greatest risk: that is our young children, our elderly and our

immuno-compromised. If they are exposed, they are going to be at

the greatest risk.

What have we learned in the last 30 years since the Clean Water

Act has passed, especially the last decade, the last 10 years? There

are a lot of these contaminants we can now find in untreated sewage, and we have methods now to look. We know that our e-coli

and our fecal coliforms, and this has been supported by the National Academy of Sciences, do not represent all constituents of

harm in sewage. And you know that in the law there is that leeway

to look at the constituents that cause public harm. Our indicators

do not represent these pathogens.

I have sampled for viruses and parasites and bacteria in untreated and treated sewage. I would just like to talk a minute

about removal by the processes. Primary treatment removes things

by settling, by taking the solids, pulling them out. It pulls out some

of the big stuff, like the worms, the helmus, they can be removed.

But it’s not very good at pulling out the little things, particularly

the viruses. It pulls out some of the bacteria, pulls out some of the

protozoa. And plants vary. You will see ranges of how much primary removes, anywhere from 50 to, say, 90 percent.

Secondary, though, removes more of these organisms. It can remove anywhere from 80 to 99.9 percent. And again, there is a wide

range of secondary facilities out there in terms of how they are operating and their design as well as their flow.

I think the people who say primary removes more than secondary have not taken a virus or a parasite sample themselves and examined it. And I don’t think they’ve done an adequate job of looking at the literature. So if we have 1,000 giardia cysts in untreated

sewage, we could remove 50 percent by primary, we’ll have 500. We

could remove 99 percent by secondary, we’re going to have 56 left

as we discharge. All you have to do is do the math. If you add in

more, you’re going to add in more.
17

Now, does present a public risk of going swimming? This is a

community issue of how they want to protect their water in the future.

I want to talk briefly about disinfection as well. We know that

disinfection is an important process for control of these microbes.

And it is influenced by upstream processes. Recent studies by the

University of North Carolina and Duke have shown that if you add

in increased particles this affects how well you can kill these organisms by both chlorination, the common disinfection process, and

UV. So it’s going to affect it.

In one case, in one study they actually added secondary effluent,

10 percent, back to drinking water. And we can kill our viruses

very well in drinking water. But in this particular study, that destroyed the ability to kill viruses in drinking water, when they

added 10 percent of secondary effluent back in.

So we also know that these organisms have varying resistance.

Cryptosporidium is extremely resistant to chlorination. We cannot

kill it with chlorination. We have to physically remove it. We can

kill it with UV. However, the viruses are extremely resistant to UV

and more susceptible to chlorination. So we do need to look at all

these processes.

I was surprised when I started looking at water quality data on

blended effluent. There are some facilities that say they blend. You

cannot find the data on the volumes that they combine and you

cannot find actual water quality data during blending and nonblending events. I took one facility that had a design and said, this

is one way that they may blend, and I did the math.

I also looked at the Milwaukee data, which is minimal, in which

you could compare concentrations of e-coli and pathogens in blended and non-blended. Basically, both from a math standpoint and a

data standpoint, there was an increase in pathogen concentrations

during blending, a thousand-fold increase, in the Milwaukee data,

we got a hundred-fold increase in the mathematical calculation.

I think that wastewater treatment and utilities and the industry

are unsung heroes. The public doesn’t understand the benefit that

wastewater provides in many cases. I do think that more monitoring is needed. I do think more investment in treatment and treatment operations and I do believe that in 30 years, we need to look

at the standards for protection of public health and take into consideration new criteria and goals for water quality. I appreciate

both the State and the Federal leadership in this role.

Thank you.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Dr. Rose, thank you for your testimony.

We will now hear testimony from Dr. Adam Olivieri, Principal

Engineer, EOA, Inc., in Oakland, California. Welcome, Dr. Olivieri.

Mr. OLIVIERI. Good morning, Chairman, and members of the

Committee. I would like to thank you, Chairman Duncan and the

members of this Committee for your continued commitment to

clean water issues in California and nationwide. Your dedication to

solving the challenges our communities face across the Nation is

essential to achieving the goals of the Clean Water Act.

The purpose of my testimony here is to improve the understanding of the public health implications associated with the practice of

wastewater treatment plant blending relative to exposure to micro-
18

bial pathogens. There is significant concern regarding the current

practice of blending treated effluent during high treatment plant

flow events prior to discharge to local receiving waters and the potential public health risk associated with probably exposure to

pathogens in receiving water. My testimony on this subject is based

on my education, experience and the evidence in the scientific literature.

There is concern regarding potential public health risk associated

with exposure to waters receiving discharge from treatment plants

that are blending with stormwaters. However, a number of factors

support the use of a risk-based management approach that allows

for the continued use of blending under conditions where current

water quality criteria are met and public health is protected. It is

my understanding that water quality criteria are met in receiving

waters at some facilities that utilize blending.

Further, blending is just one part of the puzzle. As will be discussed, risk assessment, including exposure assessment, allows

public agencies to sort out what factors are important and provides

the foundation for balance risk based management decisions. Today

the public awareness and concern about the safety of the Nation’s

water resources is high, and thus the public expectations are high

as well. In the United States, there are over 15,000 wastewater

treatment facilities, most providing primary, secondary treatment

and some form of disinfection.

When considering infectious diseases implications of human exposure to wastewater, the following factors need to be considered.

For water-borne illness or disease to occur, an agent of disease,

that is, a pathogen, must be present. The agent must be present

in sufficient concentrations to produce disease, or a dose, and a

susceptible host must come into contact with the dose in a manner

that results in infection or disease.

Although a wide range of pathogens have been identified in raw

wastewater, relatively few pathogens appear to be responsible for

the majority of waterborne illness caused by pathogens of wastewater origin. The pathogens of public health concern based on foodborne disease in the U.S. were identified by the CDC. Many of

these pathogens find their way into domestic wastewater. Although

wastewater characteristics are highly variable, there is a high

probability that microbial pathogens are present in raw wastewater

at any given time and location.

One of the important objectives of wastewater treatment is to remove or inactivate the pathogens. For time, I’ll skip a few pages.

Risk assessment has generally been the tool used to estimate

risk associated with environmental exposures to pathogens. Exposure is the most important link in the chain of infection and disease. During blending events that coincide with extreme wet

weather events, people tend to avoid swimming or recreating in receiving waters. So the potential for human contact is minimal. In

other words, the important link, exposure, is missing.

Microbial risk assessment involves evaluating likelihood that an

adverse health effect may result from human exposure to one or

more pathogens. The infectious disease process in a population is

fundamentally a dynamic process. Therefore, the most rigorous and
19

scientifically defensible approach for mathematically modeling the

infectious disease process is to employ a dynamic model.

However, the reported results of a very simple static assessment

conducted by Katonak, et al., was used to evaluate the potential

public health concerns associated with blending, and represents an

estimate of the theoretical probability of illness or infection for a

single exposure event for one individual. The static estimate is

based on a number of conservative assumptions, for example,

knowing inactivation from disinfection. It only provides a gauge

from which potential risks to an individual may be evaluated for

a single exposure event.

Clearly, as the authors noted, the estimated risks will be lower

if all flow is treated. However, the authors estimated risks even

though it was based on conservative assumptions, are within the

range of risks considered acceptable by U.S. EPA national bacterial

water criteria. From a risk management criteria, the number of

people exposed during events from blended effluent as discharged

must be taken into consideration. Risk of infection disease from a

single exposure event above some pre-determined tolerable level

does not necessarily imply that public concern is warranted. Specifically, the expected number of cases from an exposure event can

be thought of as the product of probability of illness or infection in

the number of people exposed.

The protection of public health clearly dictates that when more

individuals are potentially exposed to pathogen, a greater level of

concern and thus protection is warranted when making risk management decisions. For example, one reason a risk manager may

decide to implement a control strategy at a specific location over

another can be based on the actual or expected number of individuals potentially exposed.

Water quality regulation strategies endorsed by EPA follow the

above public health concept. In the Ambient Water Quality Criteria

for Bacteria, EPA defines an acceptable swimming associated

gastroenterital illness rate and derives water quality criteria for

designated beach areas, moderately used full body contact recreation areas, lightly used full body contact recreation areas, and infrequently used full body contact recreation areas.

In summary, a one-size-fits-all approach to address the potential

public health concerns associated with blending would probably divert limited resources towards efforts where a commensurate public health benefit would not be realized. A risk-based management

approach would better allow research to be focused on the most important public health concerns and at the same time protect the

beneficial use of the receiving waters.

It should be recognized that many aspects of the estimation and

evaluation of potential health risks associated with exposure to microbial pathogens during recreational activities and the potential

relationship to the use of blending as a management tool to treat

wastewater during peak flow conditions are poorly understood.

However, based on the above discussion, a number of factors support the use of a risk-based management approach that allows for

the continued use of blending under conditions where current

water quality criteria are met and the public health is protected.
20

I hope that above discussion helps improve the understanding of

the nature of the public health implications associated with the

practice of wastewater treatment plant blending relative to exposure to pathogens. I would be happy to accept any questions.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you, Dr. Olivieri.

The Committee will now recognize Ms. Nancy Stoner, Director of

Clean Water Project, Natural Resources Defense Council here in

Washington, D.C. Welcome and thank you.

Ms. STONER. Thank you.

Good morning. We are here today because we are at a crossroads

in one of the most important Clean Water Act programs: the program to provide secondary treatment for sewage established in the

1972 Clean Water Act. That program has been very successful in

reducing the volume of sewage dumped into lakes, rivers and coastal waters. But there’s lots of work ahead even to maintain that

progress, much less to continue to reduce sewage pollution. EPA is

making it difficult for communities by slashing the funding available to them for sewer maintenance and upgrades through America’s Clean Water Fund, the Clean Water State Revolving Fund.

NRDC appreciates the leadership of the Chair, the Ranking

Member and many other members of the Subcommittee in supporting restoration of that funding to ensure that communities have

the resources they need to provide effective sewage treatment.

But this hearing is not primarily about funding, but instead,

about treatment standards. Should sewage treatment plants be required to provide effective treatment for sewage under all routine

operating conditions, or should they be allowed to skip such treatment and rely primarily on dilution instead of treatment during

wet weather. This is a question that I believe Congress already answered back in 1972 when the decision was made to upgrade from

primary treatment, which removes only large solids from sewage,

to secondary treatment, which typically uses microbes to eat the

pollutants in sewage.

Sewage is filled with pollutants that make people sick, close

shellfish beds, make beach waters unsafe, contaminate drinking

water sources, damage coral reefs, feed toxic algal blooms and rob

the water of oxygen that fish need to breathe. Secondary treatment

removes the bulk of these pollutants from sewage: bacteria, viruses, parasite, toxic organics, metals, oxygen-depleting substances

and solids. It also provides significant removal for nutrient pollution, although advanced removal techniques are needed for discharges into nutrient-impaired waters.

Primary just doesn’t do the job. All it does is settle out the larger

particles through gravity. No transformation of the sewage takes

place. And because primary effluent is so cloudy, it cannot be effectively disinfected. Discharging effluent that has not received secondary treatment does not protect public health or the economy

from the adverse effects of sewage pollution: water-borne illness,

shellfish contamination, beach closures and so forth.

EPA’s proposed blending policy would attempt to legalize discharges of sewage effluent after only solids removal when they are

sufficiently diluted to meet end of pipe concentration limits. This

policy would put more inadequately treated sewage into the environment. That is why it has been opposed by a number of States,
21

public health officials, conservation groups, shell fishermen and a

number of offices within EPA itself. NRDC requests an opportunity

to put into the record its compilation of quotations from those filing

objections with EPA on the proposed blending policy.

EPA’s proposed policy does not require the use of alternative

treatment approaches that have been the subject of much discussion at this hearing. It does not require disinfection; it isn’t limited

to wet weather events of any particular size; and apparently most

importantly to those who support it, it doesn’t require an assessment of whether there are feasible alternatives to discharging inadequately treated sewage that should be employed instead.

The assessment of feasible alternatives is the core of what the

bypass rule requires. It requires an analysis of the sewage treatment system as a whole, to figure out how to maximize treatment

by aligning pipes, cleaning out pipes, offloading stormwater, storing

sewage until it can be treated and so forth. Those are the types of

measures that have typically been required of sewer operators over

the years to reduce excessive infiltration and inflow and assure

that sewage can be effectively treated.

EPA’s proposed blending policy undermines the incentives for

sewer operators to look system-wide for solutions, essentially to fix

their leaky sewer system. It’s a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach

in our view. The problem will only get worse because it isn’t being

effectively addressed. And remember that leaky pipes not only leak

in when it rains, but they also leak out when it doesn’t. That is,

they leak raw sewage into surface waters and groundwater.

As one sewer operator who served on a panel with me in a Water

Environment Federation conference put it, ‘‘If you remove excessive

infiltration and inflow, you don’t need to blend.’’ Exactly. EPA’s policy requires sewer systems to fix their problems, not discharge

largely untreated sewage because of their failure to do so.

NRDC fully supports and urges every member of the Committee

to co-sponsor the Save Our Waters from Sewage Act, H.R. 1126.

This bipartisan legislation would block EPA from finalizing its proposed sewage blending policy, require EPA to implement the existing Clean Water Act rule that mandate full sewage treatment

under routine operating conditions and require public notification

of discharges of inadequately treated sewage.

Finally, let me reiterate that we cannot expect communities to do

it alone. The Federal Government needs to assist them, just as it

did in the 1970s and 1980s, to maintain and upgrade their aging

sewer systems and sewage treatment plants. Surveys show that

Americans are well aware of the importance of protecting our rivers, lakes and coastal waters from sewage pollution and are willing

to pay for it. We need to move forward with the creation of a longterm funding source, a clean water trust fund which is supported

by more than 80 percent of the American public.

I understand that the Subcommittee is planning additional hearings on clean water funding issues and I commend you for doing

so. Thank you for inviting me to testify today. I would be happy

to answer any questions you may have.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you, Ms. Stoner.
22

The Committee will now recognize Mr. John Hall, President of

Hall and Associates here in Washington, D.C. Thank you, Mr. Hall,

and welcome.

Mr. HALL. Thank you, and good morning, Mr. Chairman and

Committee members. My name is John Hall. I am speaking today

on behalf of municipal organizations from Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Jersey and Minnesota.

Blending is a common wastewater engineering design practice

promoted by EPA since the 1970s. Therefore, I was quite surprised

when several regional offices began to assert that blending was a

prohibited plant design. It’s a bedrock principle of the Clean Water

Act that the agency does not dictate plant design or the selection

of the treatment process to meet the Department limits set. EPA

has frequently reiterated this position.

We contacted EPA headquarters in late 1999 to get this matter

resolved. EPA headquarters acknowledged that the regional blending prohibitions were never authorized and that ‘‘State permitting

authorities had considerable flexibility’’ to permit blending.

EPA was in the process of issuing a blending clarification when

advocacy groups began to assert that this was some type of regulatory rollback conjured up by the Bush Administration that would

allow the discharge of raw sewage. These groups published ads in

newspapers and filed thousands of objections with EPA, making

the same assertions. Attached to my testimony is an example of an

ad published in the Pittsburgh Press. It states, ‘‘We already have

too much raw sewage in our water. So why is President Bush making it worse? Stop the blending policy.’’

H.R. 1126 is apparently a product of these same representations.

Blending, however, does not involve the discharge or dumping of

raw or inadequately treated wastewater. The wastewater is treated

to meet all applicable public health standards.

Now, the primary claims of the various environmental activists

have been two-fold. One, that the secondary treatment rule mandates the use of biological treatment, and two, that the bypass rule

mandates that all flows pass through all processes at all times. As

documented in detail in my written testimony, the preambles to

both of these rules, the judicial decisions involving these rules,

plainly confirm that designing and operating a plant to blend is not

and has never been prohibited under Federal law.

The fact that the bypass rule doesn’t prohibit blending explains

why EPA routinely grant funded blending facilities throughout the

Country. If the activity were illegal under Federal law, the Federal

construction grant regulations would have prohibited the funding

of these facilities. I worked in that program for four years.

Regarding biological treatments, in 2000, Congress asked EPA to

identify the best method for treating wet weather flows. That was

part of the Wet Weather Water Quality Act of 2000. EPA’s 2004

Congressional Report concluded that non-biological methods were

the most effective at addressing pathogens and other pollutants.

The contrary assertions of various activist groups, therefore,

don’t really have a good factual or legal basis. In particular,

NRDC’s characterization in their testimony that the 1987 bypass

rule, about the bypass rule decision is wrong. In that case, EPA expressly stated and the court agreed that the bypass rule did not
23

dictate plant design and that split flow and seasonal treatments,

which is what blending is, is not a bypass. EPA clarified that the

rule was intended to prevent parties from turning off unit processes. Blending certainly doesn’t turn off any unit processes. In

fact, it promotes the maximum use of the technology. It pushes it

to the edge until it can’t take any more.

The claims that the bypass rule requires all flows to pass

through all processes at all times is simply incorrect. In fact, if

such biological treatment were required per H.R. 1126, EPA itself

has estimated that the nationwide costs of that requirement would

range somewhere between $160 billion and $210 billion. There’s a

reason for that. Biological treatment is not capable of handling

these kinds of dynamic peak flows. So you would have to do something extraordinary to it to make it handle those flows.

Now, in other testimony, the groups have asserted that secondary treatment is essential to pathogen reduction. However, in 1976,

EPA specifically amended the secondary treatment rule to eliminate pathogen reduction requirements as unnecessary and environmentally detrimental. EPA stated that, ‘‘Pathogen reduction necessitates the use of a separate, non-biological unit process specifically

designed for disinfection.’’ As mandated by EPA, States subsequently set water quality standards and set disinfection requirements as needed, seasonally and on a case by case basis for the

past 30 years.

Now, there are several critical factual points that were omitted

from Dr. Rose’s submitted testimony that confirm the pathogen

threat in the earlier analysis submitted—greatly exaggerated—and

the implied solution, biological treatment, is simply unnecessary.

Number one, while claiming cryptosporidium is a grave concern,

she failed to inform the Committee that her own blending threat

analysis demonstrated that the swimming risk associated with this

pathogen in effluent discharges is below the accepted swimming

standards. It’s not at a threat level.

Secondly, while this organism is certainly resistant to chlorine,

it is easily treated with UV disinfection as specified in the detailed

study she cited in her report. So if you want to treat it, you don’t

put in more biological, you put in UV. Last, her testimony acknowledged that giardia and viruses are reduced by chlorine, but her

threat analysis gave no credit to chlorine disinfection, thereby significantly overestimating the threat.

In conclusion, blending has been and continues to be one of the

most cost-effective means to process peak wet weather flows, while

maintaining a high quality effluence. Claims of public health threat

or illegal operation are misplaced, and as Mr. Graham testified,

disruptive of State programs that seek to minimize overflows while

ensuring effective plant operations.

I thank you for your attention to this important issue and would

be happy to answer any questions you might have in this regard.

Mr. BOUSTANY. We thank you for your testimony, and now we

will start our first round of questions. We appreciate all of your

testimony, thank you very much.

Let me start by offering the Ranking Member time to ask questions. Mr. Pascrell?

Mr. PASCRELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
24

Mr. Hall, blending may be cost-effective, but 30 percent of the

water that we assess, and this has been fairly consistent, does not

meet water quality standards. Would you please respond to that?

Mr. HALL. Certainly. And actually, there’s information—

Mr. PASCRELL. Is that correct or incorrect?

Mr. HALL. Thirty percent of—

Mr. PASCRELL. Of assessed water. We can’t assess all the water,

all the drinking water. The water that we assess, 30 percent of it

is unacceptable. Is that true or untrue in your mind?

Mr. HALL. There are a significant percentage of waters in the

State that do not meet bacteriological standards, particularly in

wet weather conditions. Failing to meet those standards generally

is not a function of municipal wastewater discharges, as demonstrated by the data appended to Mr. Graham’s testimony and

that for Ray Dami. They measured upstream and downstream of

their treatment plants during wet weather. And their effluent were

far cleaner. The effluent were below the water quality standards,

but the background water coming to them was above the standards. That water was not caused by wastewater discharges.

So what we’re seeing around the Country very often is, during

wet weather conditions, people walk their cats and dogs, you have

animal operations, even in State parks, deer, things like that, you’ll

see bacteria standards exceeded during wet weather. And I’m not

sure that those exceedances actually pose a health threat, because

I understand animal bacteria are different from human. But as

they are measured by the adopted water quality standards, often

the numbers are higher than the applicable standards.

Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Hall, the figure, as I can find, is a pretty accurate figure. It would seem to me, you’re the professional, but it

would seem to me that we would want to increase the amount of

assessed water as meeting those standards. And I would like to

know, Dr. Rose, what did you think of his answer?

Ms. ROSE. Well, as I said, I think that some of, you look at

what’s going on under the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Drinking Water rules, they are acknowledging the parasites,

cryptosporidium and giardia, and viruses as a concern. In fact, in

50 years of outbreak data, there was a significant statistical relationship between rainfall and when there were outbreaks in water

supplies. So we know that our drinking water systems are vulnerable during these events and these pathogens are getting in.

One of the problems with the bacterial standards is that they are

coming from a variety of sources. But if we look at human enteric

viruses or we use source tracking methods, we can show that they

are coming from the wastewater.

Mr. PASCRELL. But would you agree with my figure?

Ms. ROSE. Yes, I would, and I think—

Mr. PASCRELL. What do you think about that? Is that acceptable?

I mean, to listen to Mr. Hall, and this is not to disagree with him,

but to listen to Mr. Hall, that is an acceptable, consistent figure,

which if you look back over the last 10 or 15 years, has been

around 30 percent, what am I missing here? Shouldn’t we be trying

to improve that number?

Ms. ROSE. I think that many communities are trying to improve

that. If you look at TMDLs and impaired waterways, they are
25

spending a lot of money on assessment of those waters and the watersheds. If you look at the city of New York and the investment

they’ve made in advanced wastewater treatment, you look at Cincinnati and Kentucky right now, are looking at issues of wastewater treatment, advanced treatment, in fact, upstream of the

drinking water supply, closure of beaches. I certainly think that we

should be moving in the direction of trying to improve the water

quality.

Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Graham, I listened very carefully to your testimony. It would seem to me, and I want you to get me on the right

path, if I’m not on the right path, what we need to do is try to

avoid litigation and get everybody in a room and come up with an

acceptable solution, which may include blending under specific

standards. But when you say we need a solution, that does not necessarily mean we need the solution at hand.

I want your comments.

Mr. GRAHAM. Representative, I do not know what the solution is.

I wish I did. But I think where the thrust of national policy and

State policy has been is to try and address each set of waters to

set standards of what can be discharged into them. I think as has

been said by I think everyone up here, blending is one of those

tools, along with new technologies that may be coming down the

pike, disinfection and other methods of treatment to open the bag

of what the engineering tools are to allow operators and plant designers to meet the discharge limits that the environment needs.

I think that’s where, not to say blending is the only solution, it

isn’t. But it is one of those tools that should be left in the bag.

When you can meet the discharge limits and you’ve already got

your plant operating at full bore, what do you do with the extra

water that comes down? We can discharge it by letting it overflow

back upstream, or we can bring it in as blended, provide the maximum amount of treatment we can to it, and then still meet those

discharge limits as we put it out into the streams.

Mr. PASCRELL. Ms. Stoner, if I may, Mr. Chairman, just to complete, you said that we are at a crossroads. And we probably heard

that 10 years ago, but okay, we’ll accept right now we’re at a crossroads. Am I naive to ask the question of how do we get the folks

in the room to come up with a solution? I mean, in the rules,

there’s like one paragraph that deals with what are the clean water

standards, and there’s 300 pages on the exceptions.

So how, in that atmosphere, in that background, in that legacy

are we going to get folks that you talked about and that everybody

is talking about in a room to come up with something? Do you envision blending never being a possibility under different standards

that exist today?

Ms. STONER. No, actually, that’s not true. What we’re trying to

do is to implement the existing rule that says that full treatment

should be provided whenever it’s feasible—

Mr. PASCRELL. But if that isn’t possible, Ms. Stoner, if that’s impossible because of the resources that are not available, then we

need to have another option, rather than go to court every time

there’s a problem. That’s not solving the problem.

Ms. STONER. I absolutely agree with you. I have always been

willing to talk and think that we should be able to solve this, be-
26

cause the existing rule sets the right standard where blending is

disfavored, full treatment is favored, and an analysis needs to be

made of the feasible alternatives, so that we can maximize treatment. Everyone here on the panel actually said that they supported

maximizing treatment, I believe.

Mr. PASCRELL. Right.

Ms. STONER. That’s what I support also. EPA’s proposed blending

policy does not do that. It says primary treatment, and it says little

else in terms of maximizing the treatment. It’s not implementing

the law. That’s what we need to do. And we need to figure out how

to do it together.

Mr. PASCRELL. Okay, we’ve got six experts here whom I have a

great deal of respect for. I’d like to put you all in a room with EPA

and come up with a solution. You know what’s fascinating is that

we have tried, we have authorized at the leadership of this Chairman, to authorize, reauthorize legislation to provide funding for the

CSO problem that we had. We can’t get appropriations.

So you know, we talk out of both sides of our mouths. The fact

is that we cannot continue to provide more and more exceptions.

We have to look blending straight in the eye, in that is not a total

success by any stretch of the imagination. That 30 percent figure

should be—we should have a goal of over the next 10 years reducing that 30 percent to 25 or 20 percent. And we are not in the path

that we pursue.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. DUNCAN. [Presiding] Well, thank you very much, Mr.

Pascrell. Of course, that’s one of the purposes of a hearing such as

this, that we need to call more attention to these needs. That ultimately, hopefully, and usually does lead to some increased appropriations.

I’m going to go to Dr. Ehlers first, but just let me ask one question. I’ve got information here that says EPA estimated that the

cost of providing biological treatment to all combined sewer flows

of between $88 billion and $130 billion. For separate sewer flows

estimated cost would be between $79 billion and $83 billion. Collectively, this means a total cost of roughly $80 billion to $200 billion.

Most of these costs would be incurred by requiring cities to build

sewage facilities to capture all wet weather flows.

Do any of you or all of you agree that those EPA estimates on

the costs, if we eliminated blending altogether, would it cost roughly in the $100 billion to $200 billion range, or do you dispute that,

Ms. Stoner?

Ms. STONER. EPA is not able to answer a question about where

blending currently occurs in the United States and where it

doesn’t. I’ve been trying to get that information from EPA for two

years. I did a Freedom of Information Act request trying to get it.

EPA doesn’t know. EPA does not have an estimate of that. It

doesn’t have an estimate of the health risks, it doesn’t have an estimate of a lot of the things that you would want to know and the

American public want to know about its own proposed policies.

Mr. DUNCAN. If EPA doesn’t have an estimate, do you have an

estimate?

Ms. STONER. No, sir, because I don’t know which facilities in the

United States do or don’t blend. But I believe that it is appropriate
27

to consider costs in terms of the feasibility analysis I just spoke of.

Cost is an element of that. It’s an element of it in the combined

sewer overflow policy which recognizes that this practice is a bypass and should be disfavored and only allowed as an alternative.

Mr. DUNCAN. Let me ask you this. If you don’t know which facilities, would there not be a way that you could contact the major facilities around the country, assuming that you can contact them all,

the small ones as well as the large ones, but couldn’t you contact

most of the major facilities and make a sort of an educated guess

as to what the costs might be? I mean, it looks like to me like if

we talk about eliminating, if somebody wants us to eliminate something, we need to talk about what the costs would be.

Do any of you others have any cost estimates, or do you think that the EPA is correct here in this $200 billion range? What do

you think about that, Mr. Graham?

Mr. GRAHAM. Well, Limnotech did the study for EPA. We were

one of the utilities that was contacted by Limnotech. Based on talking with them, they tried as best they could to put together a realistic estimate on what the cost was.

If anything, our experience has been, when you try and put an

engineering cost to something, you’re more likely to have cost overruns, in other words, cost more than the estimate, than to cost less.

Mr. DUNCAN. So in other words, you think the estimates may indeed be low, is that what you’re saying?

Mr. GRAHAM. I think they may even be low, yes, sir.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Vicory, you wanted to say something?

Mr. VICORY. Well, as I mentioned in my testimony, the City of

Cincinnati is on the hook in a Federal consent decree for a billion

and a half dollars over the next 20 years. That cost, the basis of

that cost cap is not relief from future additional costs to the city

above that. It basically gives them relief in terms of the schedule

they have to meet in order to put their, what they call the longterm control plan together for CSOs.

And then at the end of the day, Cincinnati’s end result is probably not going to be literally complete capture and full treatment

of all the flows that they have. So I think if you take that figure

alone and extrapolate it, we’re talking obviously a huge amount of

money. I know that Atlanta, I believe, and Toledo, New Orleans I

believe all have consent decrees that are in these magnitudes of

dollars. So I think when you kind of add up in a very rough sense

the figures, we’re talking about that magnitude. And I have no

basis ultimately to refute.

But I know there are some associations out there, such as the

Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies, AMSA, they themselves would be a source of information regarding your question,

sir.

Mr. DUNCAN. All right, thank you very much. Dr. Ehlers.

Mr. EHLERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you especially

for holding this hearing. It’s an extremely important issue that our

Nation has been struggling with for some time. It’s certainly time

for resolution.

I happen to come from what I happen to think is a very wonderful community, Grand Rapids, Michigan. We faced, approximately

15 years ago, a mandate from the State to get rid of the combined
28

sewage overflow. I remember being invited by the city commission

to meet with them to explain how they could possibly handle this

horribly expensive problem. And I explained the best way to do it

is to separate the sewers, which is of course extremely expensive.

I still recall one city commissioner jumping up and screaming at

me that, this is something we can’t afford, the people won’t stand

for it, they can’t pay for it and so forth. And I countered by saying,

yes, it is expensive, but yes, the people will pay for it. They do not

like to see sewage flowing downriver. And they’re willing to pay to

not have that happen.

The upshot is, the city has gone ahead, I’m very proud of my city.

They have spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars, and it’s not

a large city, 180,000 people. My sewage treatment bills have gone

up I would say at least five-fold since then, and that sounds exorbitant. But today, we are fishing in that river. Some people actually

swim in the river. And my bills have gone up five-fold, my sewage

treatment bill is considerably less than my cable TV bill, even more

so less than my telephone bill, less than my cell phone bill, less

than my water bill. You go right down the line.

They bonded for it, they got some money from the State revolving

fund. The city has simply tackled the problem and I think done a

first-rate job and deserves a commendation for that. At the same

time, the city of Detroit received the same instructions at the same

time, and they are still pouring millions of gallons of sewage into

the river and into the Great Lakes system every year.

My point is simply, there are solutions out there. They are not

cheap, but the public, I believe, is willing to pay for them. I don’t

think we should expect the Federal Government to pay for it all.

We can help with the revolving loan fund. But communities still

have bonding authority and as I say, the public is willing to pay

this what I think is still relatively a minimal charge. Typically a

monthly charge is less than taking your family out for hamburgers.

And I think providing proper treatment for what happens to the

hamburgers after you eat them is a reasonable thing to do.

Now, end of sermon. Dr. Rose, I’m sorry I missed your testimony.

We have two committee markups going on simultaneously, and I

had to be in those. But it’s very discouraging reading your testimony, which I’ve done, all these little critters, viruses, other entities in the water. Let me ask, if you came to a body of water that

did not have human habitation nearby, in other words, a lake without cottages on it, or a mountain stream, how many of these organisms would you find in that water, and how dangerous would it

be for humans to drink that water?

Ms. ROSE. Well, we do know that all waters will have some level

of fecal contamination from a variety of animals. But the more you

have humans near that water, the more variety of pathogens you

will have, and the greater the concentrations. For example, the viruses, there are over 100 different types of enteric viruses. They

only come from human waste and human sewage. And in fact, although the cattle might have been blamed in Milwaukee when they

did the genetic testing of the cryptosporidium they found that it actually was the type that came from human sewage.

And so I think that when we look at wastewater in a community,

we can find these different pathogens there, we find them in high
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concentrations. And they’re fairly young. They’ve just been excreted, they’ve just come out of another infected person, and they’re

in the water. So as we get closer and closer to urban and high density populations, we find more of these types of microbial contaminants. So that means that the risk goes up if we are being exposed

to those waters without adequate treatment.

I certainly, Dr. Ehlers, support what you’ve said about the public

and trying to make priorities when there is a very costly problem

in front of them and trying to decide how they want to spend their

dollar. I think knowledge and information is important to the decision that the community is going to make.

So if these facilities are blending or undertaking these other options, perhaps more water quality data and more information could

help communities decide how they want to spend their dollars. If

the infrastructure is at a D, maybe we are going to have to invest

in infrastructure anyway, and perhaps there are ways we can kill

two birds with one stone if we look broadly at the problem.

Mr. EHLERS. In your testimony, you talk about some of the organisms that are in there. it seems, looking at your testimony, that

a surprising number survive the treatment process. If blending

were used in a fashion that didn’t change the number or by very

much, would blending be acceptable?

Ms. ROSE. Well, it does change the number. But there is a wide

variation. I think as was pointed out in the testimony by my colleagues up here, some wastewater plants don’t even have primary.

Some don’t do a very good job at secondary. So when you’re blending, you might get different numbers.

But if you look generally, primary contains higher concentrations. So when you mix it with secondary, you’re adding more organisms and you’re adding also more solids that impacts the disinfection process. You’re going to try to kill the organisms after blending.

And you can easily kill the e-coli and fecal coloforms. But the

studies have shown that it’s the viruses and these parasites that

are more difficult to kill and are affected by increased particles to

the effluent. So the approach I took is just one approach. I think

it could be used in a whole variety of different facilities that may

have, at different times, different blending scenarios that they

might want to use. I think it could inform management on how

they might want to go about blending different streams under different flow conditions at different times in terms of the risk.

Mr. EHLERS. You didn’t discuss, at least I didn’t see anything in

here about tertiary treatment. What does that consist of? Does that

really take care of the rest of the organisms?

Ms. ROSE. Well, in the reclaimed water arena, in Florida and in

the West, where they take wastewater and they reclaim it and

reuse it, tertiary treatment generally refers to a filtration after secondary. So what they do is they use a filter, like a sand filter,

that’s similarly used in drinking water. It therefore reduces the

pathogens even more.

I’ve seen some of the newer facilities produce effluent in which

you cannot detect any of these pathogens in their final effluent. It

also makes the disinfection process very effective. So it undergoes
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primary, secondary, then filtration, then disinfection. So it takes

even more particles out.

Some tertiary treatment refers to nutrient removal as well, so

there are facilities that, after secondary, they take, the ammonia

goes to nitrate, then they take the nitrate out of the water. Tampa

Bay was able to get money because they discharge to the bay, and

Hillsborough County and the city of Tampa, to take out the nitrogen before they discharge. That was also advanced, considered tertiary treatment. So there are different forms.

Mr. EHLERS. One last question. You mentioned a moment ago

that in some cases, there is only primary treatment, sometimes not

even that. In other cases, partial secondary treatment. Are you referring to that occurring as a result of blending, or were you saying

there are treatment plants in the U.S that are treating sewage and

still only doing primary?

Ms. ROSE. Yes, what I mentioned was, there are facilities that

skip primary, they go right to secondary, they don’t even have primary treatment. But also there are facilities that have a waiver

from the Clean Water Act and they discharge primary. Hawaii was

one of those, and in fact, there was an issue with whether the outfall was impacting the beaches. They decided to go to what’s called

an enhanced primary. It’s one technique in which you can get primary to better treat and remove organisms, and then you can better disinfect. So Honolulu and Mamala Bay is one example where

they had a waiver.

Mr. EHLERS. But this is without blending? This is actually wastewater treatment?

Ms. ROSE. This is actually a wastewater treatment plant that

achieved primary treatment and then discharged through the ocean

outfall and used a diffuser to dilute the wastewater in the oceans.

Mr. EHLERS. I didn’t realize we had any plants left like that in

the United States.

Ms. ROSE. There are a few.

Mr. EHLERS. We should not have any. Thank you. I yield back.

Mr. BOUSTANY. [Presiding] Thank you, Mr. Ehlers.

The Chair now recognizes Mrs. Schwartz.

Mrs. SCHWARTZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for all of your testimony. Just a couple questions, if

I may. One thing that wasn’t mentioned, as a point of information,

I guess, I understand there are now waivers for extreme conditions.

So we’re not asking anyone to build or rebuild a water treatment

or sewage treatment plant for any circumstance. We do understand

there are hurricanes, I’m not sure what wet weather is, but I do

understand there are extreme conditions, and it would be, from a

cost-benefit analysis, not sensible to prepare for these rare occurrences.

So I think what—you’re all nodding, so this is one we all agree

on. Good. So what we’re really looking at is, it seems to me, what

is really the goal here. Is the goal to say, look, we’ve made a great

deal of progress, but it’s expensive and we don’t have the money

so let’s do the best we can? Or is the goal to really do much better

and continue the progress that we have made in cleaning up the

water?
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Certainly there are a couple of you who referred to the fact that

you have some connection to Pennsylvania and that’s interesting to

me. Certainly our Department of Environmental Resources,

through the Deputy Secretary for Water Management, has made it

very clear that they’re not pleased about this policy and the change

in this policy from the EPA. So if any of you have any statement

you want to provide to me separately that implies that that’s not

correct, I would be interested in hearing that.

What I am hearing certainly from my constituents is that they

believe that the goal has to be clean water. That’s been the goal

for 30 years. The issue is, how are we going to get there, how does

that make sense. You know as well as I do the President’s 2006

budget actually reduced the amount of money available to the

State revolving fund that was just talked about by my colleague.

So that’s not helping States and municipalities move in the direction of improving the water and sewer treatment facilities and the

infrastructure, which is aging and does need improvement.

So that to me is not moving in the right direction, if our goal is

to increase the clean water available to Americans and I believe it

has to be.

One of the things I was interested in is that, it seems that what

we are talking about, the proposal is should we have more blending

or not. That seems to me to leave off a whole other list of what we

might be able to do. No one really has mentioned that. Some of my

constituents say, why all of a sudden is this such a problem. I believe the problem is that, well, we have standards we want to meet,

we have an aging infrastructure.

But the other is, all the development, much of which we’re very

proud of, that in fact has increased water flow. Part of my district

has seen flooding that never has before. They don’t know why that

creek is overflowing, forgetting that they just put in a new supermarket and a whole new pavement and a lot more of that community is paved over than it ever was before. So the water is not

being absorbed. And I’m not the expert, you’re the experts, the

water is not being absorbed, it’s running off and flooding, and in

fact has resulted in some new problems that we have to fix.

So one of my questions is, why not put on the table what else

we could be doing in addition to helping our local municipalities be

able to improve their infrastructure? But why not also put on the

table, I understand there are some new technologies unrelated to

the infrastructure of water and sewer treatment and unrelated to

the regulations actually that would help, for example, create more

porous paving for our parking lots. I mean, this is not new age

stuff here, this is something that, in my district, I have a wonderful arboretum, their parking lot has porous paving. They don’t have

a runoff problem.

Now, you’re going to tell me that’s expensive too . But somewhere along the line, we have to figure out where we’re going to

start to encourage some of the other kinds of infrastructure that is

being developed and being built, being done in a way that doesn’t

then cause us to have to make up for the problems that are caused

by that.

So I know there are stormwater gardens, and again, I know this

sort of sounds like green stuff, but in fact, this is new technology
32

that we know can make a difference that could in fact potentially

save taxpayers billions of dollars over the next few years. So again,

I understand the cost benefit analysis, we’re talking about $200 billion being awfully expensive over the next 10 or 20 or 30 years for

infrastructure, when in fact we talk about spending $200 billion in

other ways, it seems like, oh, that’s not a big deal.

I think this is all very much a question of what are our priorities.

But my question here is, what else could we be doing that none of

you have mentioned that in fact could both save municipalities and

States money, one, and two, are there other ways we should be

helping our municipalities be able to pay for some of that infrastructure, that we’re moving in the wrong direction? And three,

isn’t our goal cleaner water? It seems to me the EPA’s regulations

are saying, you know, we’re throwing up our hands, we can’t do it

fast enough so we’re just going to make it less of a priority.

Those are big questions, but maybe I would start with you, Ms.

Stoner, you’re nodding. If you would talk about what else we could

be doing that no one else has actually mentioned.

Ms. STONER. Yes, I am nodding, because you are all over it.

That’s exactly what we need to do. We need to look system-wide

at the collection system, where is the water coming from into the

system. Of course, Pennsylvania has a lot of combined systems.

One of the ways to address the problem of having too much water

in the system is to offload it to allow it to seep into the ground.

So soil and vegetation can treat it as Mother Nature has done,

we’re now trying to mimic that through the use of rain gardens,

through the use of green roofs, just simple things like disconnecting

the downspouts from our houses so that they run out into the yard

where the water can then sink into the soil, replenish the groundwater supplies and stay out of the sewer system.

That’s part of the solution, is to look broadly. Part of the problem

that I see with this blending or bypass approach is that it isn’t

looking broadly, it’s looking at the treatment plant. Dilute water is

coming into the treatment plant, what do we do now. And it offers

a solution that is not as good as actually treating it.

There are other ways to look more broadly at how we can meet

multiple goals, having cleaner water, having replenished groundwater supplies, even having a more beautiful environment. Rain

gardens are beautiful, as are green roofs. Helping with the heat island effect, reducing air pollution, it’s all of the piece. If we look

broadly and spend our dollars wisely on those kinds of approaches,

which are often called green infrastructure approaches, we can accomplish more for our communities and for our environment.

Mrs. SCHWARTZ. Thank you.

The only other question I would ask is, again, something I mentioned in my opening remarks, but a concern I have is that for

some of our States and municipalities in particular that have actually been spending money over the last two decades for sure on infrastructure, and I know that the Philadelphia water department

in the last 20 or 30 years actually spent almost $1 billion to improve the water treatment, and is operating now three award-winning pollution control plants. Secondary treatment systems are in

place in all three of our water pollution control plants. And again,

we’ve spent about a billion dollars.
33

If we move in this direction that has been suggested by the regulations from the EPA, is this actually going to reward municipalities that have sat on their hands or discourage the kinds of investments that my colleague on the other side of the aisle was sort of

saying his community is wiling to make? And in fact saying to our

local communities, don’t spend money on improving the infrastructure because in fact, we are not going to really require you to do

it and we’re going to acknowledge that it’s too hard.

So we’re actually again creating rewards and incentives to do

less rather than rewards and incentives for the communities that

have actually taken some real responsibility to think about the future and to start to plan ahead and to start to create what really

are more innovative, potentially more cost-effective in the future,

kinds of water treatment and sewer plants, recognizing that so

many of our communities have to do this. Some have stepped up

to the plate to do it.

So how do we switch gears here and actually encourage the communities to do that? Are there financial incentives to do that?

There are obviously grant programs. But one of my big concerns is

that these changes will actually encourage allowing or blending,

but discourage the kind of investment that’s not going to go away.

These are still aging systems that need to be upgraded, and as I

say, many municipalities that are struggling are in fact still making this kind of investment.

So maybe this is a question for Mr. Graham, Mr. Vicory, you

might want to say, why not encourage this kind of investment that

you have to make in your municipality? Why discourage it?

Mr. GRAHAM. I don’t think we are discouraging it. The city of

Maryville, which I work for, has very actively supported us in the

water and the wastewater treatment to spend the monies that we

have been spending to decrease our I&I, significantly decrease it

over the course of the last 15 years.

Where our problem has come is with Region IV saying, no blending, any time, anywhere, it’s illegal. We took plant down and that

region said, you can’t do it, period.

Mrs. SCHWARTZ. Even in extreme situations?

Mr. GRAHAM. Even in extreme situations.

Mrs. SCHWARTZ. So is that what’s driving this, is that the EPA

or the region—you didn’t actually say, maybe that’s a problem with

their interpretation of the current regulations rather than a call for

significant changes in those regulations? It’s a rather big answer

to what might be a regional administrator, I don’t know.

Mr. GRAHAM. What we’re asking for is a clarification of those

rules so that we know what we can and cannot do on the other

side.

Mrs. SCHWARTZ. I think that’s a very different problem than actually rewriting the regulations.

Mr. GRAHAM. I don’t think we’re rewriting the regulations, Mrs.

Schwartz. I think what we’re asking for in our opinion, and what

EPA has said in their Freedom of Information, is that blending has

been in the tools and that the secondary, the Clean Water Act

doesn’t prohibit blending. To address whether blending is the primary one, no. Blending in our plant is what we do when the water

goes above a certain level. Every time, all of us have at some point
34

in time had a sink overflow, or a tub overflow, the water’s been too

much going into the system to be handled under the conditions

that it was originally designed for.

Where we look at blending is to try and handle those peak, infrequent flows when the biological side, and biology rules in a biological treatment plant, it can only take so much of a surge or so much

starvation between the dosages of sewage that’s going on. Whether

it’s blending or storage, that is the approach that helps you equalize and get the maximum treatment while still meeting those discharge limits that the State and the EPA have set as being protective of the water body that we’re discharging to.

Mrs. SCHWARTZ. So then I’ll just close with this, it sounds like

what you’re saying then is that you are supportive of continuing to

upgrade the infrastructure and make those kinds of investments

and hopefully not calling for blending too often. The question is

getting that right, of course.

But maybe that speaks to what the Ranking Member talked

about earlier, which is, that’s getting the right people in the room

to make sure the interpretation is addressing some of your concerns, rather than making changes that could have dramatic effects

on other areas or not experiencing the same kind of response from

the region. Maybe that’s something to look at more locally and see

if we can’t get kind of, some kind of response from your own delegation. Obviously you have some folks here from Tennessee who

might be able to bring the EPA in and see if you can’t have some

other discussion about that.

But anyway, Mr. Chairman, thank you.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you, Mrs. Schwartz.

I have one question while I have the Chair that I’d like to ask.

Mr. Graham, you mentioned in your testimony concerns about misinformation. I’m someone who has a health care background and

understands the importance of Koch’s postulates when dealing with

microorganisms and so forth.

It’s my understanding that in some communities that have practiced blending, there have been communities that have practiced

blending over the past 30 years, in this time frame, have there

been any reports of outbreaks of pathogens, and a real good study

done to show that it was related to the facility that was in question? Ms. Rose, would you like to handle that? Dr. Rose, I’m sorry.

Ms. ROSE. Specifically looking at blending and tying it back, that

is one of the problems. I think more studies do need to investigate

this, and investigate both water quality and public health impacts.

That is perhaps through better epidemiological and health surveillance. So I definitely support that there’s not enough information

to actually test Koch’s postulates right now.

What we do know is that in 50 years of waterborne disease outbreaks in the United States, they are statistically related to events

with high precipitation. And so in high flow, we’re getting more

outbreaks, waterborne outbreaks, from these types of pathogens,

including viruses, giardia and cryptosporidium. So the question becomes, then, during these events, if our 50 years of data, and that’s

from epidemiological surveillance, shows this relationship, how do

we go to the community level and start investigating and investing

to make the association.
35

I do think investment in science and research, I think the work

that the Water Environment Research Foundation is embarking on

is extremely important. I think we have not invested enough research and science into the wastewater side of the water industry.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you.

Mr. Vicory, same question. What are your thoughts?

Mr. VICORY. Well, there’s no information that’s come across my

desk that indicates there has been what might be termed a defined

outbreak as a result of a discharge from a blended facility.

But I have to put that in context, I think it’s important to do

that. When you look at the Ohio River, which is kind of my hometown, Cincinnati, the number of people that literally use that river

for swimming purposes and get the kind of direct exposure, you

know, it’s really, I think, practically speaking, on an nice day, probably a handful of people. A lot of people use the Ohio River for

recreation. Many of them are in boats. But the number of people

that literally have the jet-skis or are on the water skis are really

not that many.

And even if there was somebody who got sick, or two or three

people, they could live in totally opposite parts of town, they could

live in a different State. So trying to tie visits to a hospital or visits

to a doctor to the anecdotal use of the Ohio River, you can hopefully understand how difficult that really is.

But having said that, that when you look at a wet weather situation in the Ohio River and Cincinnati, and the bacterial loading

that occurs from the Cincinnati side or the northern Kentucky side,

Cincinnati has roughly 250 sewage overflow structures, the northern Kentucky side probably has 70 to 100. When you look at the

loading of bacteria in a wet weather event, the amount of bacteria

that ends up going into the river from a blended sewage treatment

plant effluent that gets disinfection, versus the bacteria in the combination of sewer overflows, there could be 10, 15 sewer overflows,

could be 300 overflows, the ratio of bacterial input is, I think, practically speaking, very small if not relatively minuscule, of a blended

effluent versus the raw sewage that’s being discharged in these

overflow points.

So even if you had some information that people were getting

sick in the Ohio River and literally tying it to the blended effluent

versus the other inputs, I think, would be probably almost impossible to do. But that issue that I speak of, about relative loadings,

really gets back, I think, at the heart of the issue that’s important

for a community when they talk about bacteria in the river. That’s

ultimately what we’re trying to do here, is to achieve water quality,

that a community needs to spend its money it’s struggling to acquire in a fashion that, as was mentioned earlier, that gets at

where can we reduce the risks the most for the money that we

spend, how do we do that.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you. I think as we move forward, having

some of that scientific data and relating it to outbreaks is going to

be very useful. Because the big challenge is going to be looking at

cost benefit analysis, because we’ve got aging infrastructure and

major concerns. So I think the lesson here would be to try to come

up with some studies.
36

I guess one other question, quickly, and that is, are there standard methodologies of looking at the effluent right now in blended

water? I mean, is there a standard being used to quantify organisms across the board or facilities are using different methodologies? Anybody who might have an answer to that question, I would

appreciate it.

Mr. GRAHAM. Each State puts requirements on the discharging

facility. It’s called the NPDES permit. In our case, we are required

to monitor the discharge for the pollutants that have been identified. The Little River, there, for example, is a TMDL on coliform.

We monitor for coliform, we monitor for total suspended solids and

we monitor for BOD.

If the State has additional rules that says, we need to monitor

for additional items, then we would monitor for that. That is part

of that NPDES permit, and I think that would be a basis to start

from as to what needs to be monitored for, and getting that information in from the utilities can provide a lot of that.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you.

Now the Chair would like to recognize the Chairman of this Subcommittee.

Mr. DUNCAN. Well, thank you, Dr. Boustany. And of course,

you’re the Vice Chair of this Subcommittee and I do appreciate

your participation and taking over for me. I’ve had two different

markups going in two different committees, in addition to this Subcommittee this morning. I usually try to stay for just about every

bit of a hearing. I apologize to the witnesses, because I do think

this is a very important subject. I’m not going to ask any questions,

because I’m supposed to speak at a meeting at noon, and another

meeting at 1:00 and another group at 2:00. I don’t know how I’m

going to do it all.

But I do want to thank you once again for coming. I say this, for

whatever reason, the Congress doesn’t have very many scientific or

technical people in the Congress, very few. Dr. Ehlers is one of the

very rare exceptions. So we need, I think, a closer working relationship with those who do have scientific and technical knowledge in

many of these fields. You are going to have to explain things to us

in a simple way that 98 percent of us can understand these things.

But I think that we’ve got to rely most heavily on the people who

are on the firing line. I have talked to many people over the years

such as Mr. Vicory and Mr. Graham, who have worked or are

working in our water treatment facilities. And I’ve never seen a

one yet that wants to put out a dirty product or discharge sewage.

Some people act like there are people in those facilities who want

to harm people, and I just have never found anybody in that situation.

I do think it’s unfortunate, we are probably spending more per

capita on the water system in Iraq, at least at the Federal level,

than we are on the water system here in this country. Thank goodness, the States and the local governments and the ratepayers are

doing as much as they are doing.

Now, I told Dr. Ehlers, I agreed with him on the cable TV and

cell phone bills. In fact, I wrote the FCC several weeks ago or two

or three months ago opposing use of the cell phones on the airplanes. But I put in my last newsletter something about that, then
37

I said, if young people would conservatively invest what they are

paying in their cable TV and cell phone bills each month, they

probably could retire early with substantial fortunes.

But having said that, and I do agree with what he said, that people probably should and probably are willing to pay a little bit

more on their water bills, because they are getting a real bargain.

But having said that, and I don’t represent, some people up here

think because I’m from east Tennessee, I represent this Appalachian poverty district where we still have outhouses and all that. And

that is so totally false. Our economy in east Tennessee is better

than probably 90 percent of the places in this country. It’s become

one of the most popular places to move to.

On the other hand, even where the economy is good, most of the

people that all of us represent don’t have a lot of excess funds.

Your average, typical families out here are having difficulties paying all their bills and so forth. So I don’t know that we want to advocate five or ten-fold increases in our water bills, at least doing

it very quickly. So we’ve got to use a little common sense in these

situations, we’ve got to use a little balance and realize that people

have so many other things that they have to pay for in addition

to all this.

So we need to work together, and I know Dr. Rose has looked

into the emerging technologies that are coming about. I don’t understand the technology but I have read and been told that it’s far

improved over what it was 25 or 30 years ago. It seems that it’s

moving even faster now.

So hopefully a combination of doing a little more at the Federal

level, using a little common sense and going to some of the emerging new technology, and just a whole combination of things, we can

keep improving this product that we’re putting out for the American people. And I look forward to hearing from each of you in the

future, and working more closely with you to try to solve what I

think is very, very important.

With that, I’ll yield back to Dr. Boustany for any closing comments or questions that he has, and I’ll run off to my meeting.

Thank you very much.

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would just like to close by saying thank you all for coming to

testify. We appreciate your patience in answering our questions

and we certainly look forward to working with all of you.

With that, we will adjourn the Subcommittee hearing. Thank

you.

[Whereupon, at 12:07 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252

Æ